The Seedling Under One Pair of Eyes

For the grower who does his best work at six in the morning when the polytunnel is empty.

It's ten past six and the plastic is still cold to the touch. You've got the trays out on the bench and the light through the roof has gone from gray to the color it goes at this time of year, and there is nobody else on the site for another two hours.

This is when you do the work that matters. Pricking out, splitting root balls, deciding which of four hundred seedlings goes on and which goes on the heap. It's fast, it's accurate, and it is almost entirely done by your hands without much involvement from you.

By nine there are four people here and you're doing something else. Paperwork at the table by the door. Watering. Moving trays that don't need moving. Anything with a low chance of being watched closely.

That pattern has held for two seasons and nobody on the site has ever remarked on it, because a busy man moving trays looks exactly like a busy man moving trays. You've never had to explain it to anybody, including yourself.

Stopping the good work at nine is not scheduling and it is not modesty, it is fear of being watched from eighteen inches away, answered here as fear. Scripture says God has searched you and known you completely, and the Holy Spirit is not impatient with a man frightened of being watched at close range.

Naming the Fear Properly

It is worth noticing what the pattern has cost the mornings themselves. You start at six because the light is right and the plastic is cold and the work goes well in that hour. You finish at nine because people arrive, not because the work is done.

So the best three hours of your day are set by other people's arrival times rather than by the trays. That is a strange way to run a nursery, and nobody has ever questioned it because nobody has ever seen it.

Be exact, because the wrong name for a fear is most of what keeps it in place.

It isn't the work. You could do this blindfolded. You know within about two seconds whether a seedling is going on, and you've been right often enough that the survival rate on this site is the best it has been.

The fear is about proximity. A man watching you prick out seedlings is standing eighteen inches away looking at your hands. That is much closer than anybody ordinarily gets, and there is nothing to look at except you doing something, which makes you the whole of the view.

You are afraid of closeness, not of being found wanting. The written Word says God knows your sitting down and your rising up, and understands your thought while it is still far off. The Holy Spirit works in the part of you that cannot bear being the whole of somebody's view.

That's worth naming precisely. The usual advice assumes a man doubts his own skill. You don't, and everybody on the site knows you don't.

What Six in the Morning Is Buying

Give the early start its due, because it purchases something real and it deserves respect.

Alone, you are nobody's view. The work is fast and clean, the survival rate is what it is, and no part of you is running commentary for an audience. That's genuine, and it's also why the site's best work happens before anybody arrives.

Here's the other column. There's a woman here in her second season who is losing about a third of what she handles, and she is losing them for one reason you would spot instantly. Nobody has shown her, because the only man who could is finished by nine and doing paperwork.

The hour that protects you is the hour that keeps the help unavailable. Scripture puts your standing in what God knows of you rather than in what a colleague sees at close range, and the Holy Spirit steadies a man under real proximity rather than pretending it is easy.

Nothing here asks you to run training days, stand up in front of a group, or become a man who likes being watched. One teammate, one bench by the door, twenty minutes.

What Twenty Minutes at Close Range Would Cost

Count it honestly, because the fear has been charging for two seasons without ever showing its arithmetic.

If she stands at that bench and watches your hands for twenty minutes, here is the realistic spread. She sees the thing she's been doing wrong and stops doing it, which is the entire point. She asks a question you hadn't thought about, which happens and is useful. You fumble two seedlings out of forty because you're being watched, and she doesn't notice, because she is looking at what you're doing rather than at how you're feeling.

Not one of those ends with a colleague revising her view of you. That's what the fear keeps implying, and it has never once been made to justify the claim.

You have somebody standing eighteen inches from your hands, and that is not somebody standing in judgment. The written Word says He is acquainted with all your ways, and the Holy Spirit keeps your worth where God set it rather than where a watching face puts it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Tahoma This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.