Pulling It Up to Look at the Roots

His grandmother used to say that a boy who keeps pulling up the bean will never eat one, and she said it to him personally, more than once, because he was that boy.

He was about seven. He had planted a row and he could not stand not knowing, so every second morning he would take one up, gently, and look at the white threads on the bottom of it, and put it back in and press the soil round it with both hands, very carefully, and he could not understand why his were behind his cousin's by August.

Wes is forty-four now and he does not pull up beans anymore. He does it to himself, every morning, before six, sitting on the back step with a coffee.

The inspection has a shape to it. He checks whether he prayed with any real attention yesterday. He checks whether he was patient with the boy about the gate. He checks how he felt in the meeting on Sunday against how he felt the Sunday before. He checks whether he is further on than he was in April, and he cannot ever quite tell, and by the time the sun is properly up he has usually concluded that he is not, and he goes and starts the day with that in his back pocket.

He would call it self-examination and he would call it a discipline, and it has the shape of a good thing, which is exactly what makes it hard to see.

But he is doing to his own soul what he did to that row at seven, and he is getting the same result his grandmother predicted, and nobody has ever said it to him in a sentence he could hear.

If you check yourself every morning, hear the question and let it sit a minute. What do you think the checking does to the roots?

Paul divides up the work and keeps one part out of human hands

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.1 Corinthians 3:6

Look at how the labor is divided, because Paul is being precise and he is settling an argument.

I have planted. A real job, done by a man.

Apollos watered. Also a real job, also done by a man.

But God gave the increase. And that is not on the human list at all.

Planting and watering are the parts that people do, and they are honest work, and Paul does not belittle them. The increase, the actual growing, the thing that turns a seed into a plant, is God's and is described as a gift He gives.

Now here is what that means for a man on a back step at six in the morning. Wes has been auditing the increase. Every day, first thing, he has been measuring the one part of the operation that was never assigned to him and is not visible anyway.

You are auditing the increase, and it is already God's part, and Paul put it outside the human column deliberately. I am not letting a serious man off self-examination. It is written in 1 Corinthians 3:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a division of labor written to settle a church argument and lays it on a man with a coffee at six.

What the checking actually costs

And now the plain thing, which his grandmother said better than I will.

A bean pulled up and put back does not die. That is why the damage is so hard to see. It goes back in, it looks the same, it carries on. It is simply behind, permanently, by the amount of shock, and by August the difference is visible and the boy has no idea why.

Daily inspection of a growing thing is not neutral. It costs.

In a man it costs like this: every morning Wes takes a spiritual reading, and every morning the reading is inconclusive, because growth is not visible on a twenty-four hour timescale in anybody, ever. So he goes into his day with an inconclusive reading, and inconclusive always feels like negative, and he starts every day mildly discouraged about God's work in him. Multiply by four years.

You are being set back by an examination, and it is already doing the harm, and the roots have never once had a season without a hand in them. Scripture says God gives the increase, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the growing in the hours a man is not looking at it.

Nobody is telling him not to examine himself

Now let me be straight, because Wes will spot a loophole being handed to him and he does not want one.

Scripture does say examine yourselves. It is real, and it is right, and a man who never looked at his own life would be a fool.

But look at how the Bible actually does it. Self-examination in Scripture is periodic, it is occasioned, it has an object, and it ends. Before the table. In a psalm at night. When a specific thing has gone wrong. It is a man looking at a particular matter, dealing with it, and going back to work.

What Wes does is not that. It is a daily general audit with no object and no conclusion, and the difference between the two is the difference between checking your crop after a storm and pulling it up every second morning at seven years old.

You are permitted to look at a particular thing and finish, and it is already the pattern in the word. It is written that God gives the increase, and the Holy Spirit is the one who convicts a man about a specific matter rather than leaving him with a general daily verdict.