First the Blade

His temper is exactly what it was, and he has decided that this settles the matter.

Not his behavior; that has changed a bit. He does not say the things he used to say and he leaves the room now, which he never used to do, and his wife has noticed and has not mentioned it, which is its own kind of comment.

But the thing itself, the sudden hot rise of it when his brother-in-law talks about money, the whole apparatus in his chest, is identical. He can measure it against last year exactly, because he remembers the specific evening last year, and he had the same evening in June.

Hosni is forty-two and he came to Christ fourteen months ago, and he expected that this would go. Not instantly. He is not naive and nobody promised him instantly. But he expected a direction, and what he has is a flat line, and a flat line after fourteen months is not a slow start, it is a result.

So he has begun to conclude the obvious thing. That whatever happened at the beginning was real for the people around him and not for him. That if a tree is known by its fruit, and he has walked out to look at his own tree every week for a year, then he has his answer, and he does not need anyone to soften it.

He waters the pots out here in the mornings because his mother left them to him and he is not going to be the one who lets them go. He is out here now with the can, looking at a bed with nothing in it.

If you are that man, hear this before anything else: the whole of your conclusion rests on a single assumption you have never once examined, which is that if something is happening, you would be able to see it.

Jesus gives the sequence out loud

For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:28

He is explaining what the kingdom of God is like, and He does something unusual: He gives the stages by name, in order, as though He expected people to need the order.

First the blade. The first visible thing is a blade, which is a thin green line and is not food and could not feed anybody. It is not impressive and it would not satisfy a man measuring for fruit.

Then the ear. After that the full corn in the ear. Two more stages after that, and the last one is the one Hosni has been checking for since month one.

And notice what is not in the list. The list starts at the blade, which is the first thing you can see. Everything before that, the swelling, the splitting, the root going down, happens under the soil and is not in the sequence at all because nobody can watch it.

Hosni has been standing over a bed at the earliest stage of a process, holding it to the standard of the last one.

You are at a stage in a named sequence, and it is already underway, and Jesus gave the order out loud because He knew people would measure the first thing against the last. I am not consoling a man over his temper. It is written in Mark 4:28, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a farmer's sequence and lays it in front of somebody with a watering can.

Of herself, and who is doing the work

There is one more phrase in that verse and it is the one that takes the weight off him.

The earth bringeth forth fruit of herself. In the verses around it, the man in the parable sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed springs up and grows, and He says plainly: he knoweth not how.

The farmer is not the engine. He does not know the mechanism, he cannot accelerate it, and the growth is not a report on his diligence. He plants, he waits, he sleeps, and the ground does what ground does.

Which means the flat line Hosni is reading as a verdict on himself is not even in his department.

You are not the mechanism of your own growth, and it is already being carried out by something you did not start, and you do not know how, and that is the parable's own phrase. Scripture says the seed springs and grows up, he knows not how, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the work in a man during a year that looked, from above, like nothing at all.

The behavior he has not counted

And now the thing I would say kneeling by that bed, because there is evidence here and he has thrown it out.

He leaves the room. He said it himself and he said it dismissively, as a small thing, hardly worth reporting. But a man whose internal temperature is identical and whose feet now take him out of the room is not a man with a flat line. That is the blade.

It is not the fruit. It is not the full corn in the ear, and I am not going to call it that, because a man like Hosni will not accept an inflated report and he should not.

But he has been looking for the wrong stage, and while he was looking for it, the first stage came up and he stepped over it on his way out to check the bed.

You have something showing already, and it is already the first named stage, and it came up while you were looking past it for the last one. It is written that first comes the blade, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man the thin green thing he has been walking over.