Six Pots on a Step

He waters at six in the evening because that is when he has always watered, and the habit outlived the orchard by about four years now.

There are six pots on the step. Two tomatoes staked with tomato stakes he cut himself out of a broken pallet. A bell pepper that is doing better than it has any right to in that little dirt. A strawberry in a hanging basket his granddaughter picked out. A pot of basil, which he does not much care for but keeps because it smells like something. And on the end, in a half barrel that took two men to get up the outside stairs, a peach tree about as big around as his thumb.

He fills a plastic watering can at the kitchen sink and carries it out twice, because the can is small and the step is not far. The concrete holds heat. There is a rail he does not need yet. Below him is a parking lot and a strip of grass the management mows on Wednesdays whether it needs it or not.

He leased that ground thirty-one years. Four hundred trees when it was full, and he could tell you where every one of them stood and which ones came out in the ice storm and which row went in the spring his wife had her surgery. The man who owned it died in November, and the heirs did what heirs do, and a company bought it, and in February a machine went down the rows and pushed the trees into windrows and they burned them, and he did not go and watch and he has never once been sorry that he did not.

So he stands on a concrete step with a watering can in his hand at six in the evening and he does the arithmetic that he cannot help doing. Six. He had four hundred. Six.

His daughter brought the pots in April and set them up herself and was so pleased, and he said they were fine, and they are fine, and he has watered them every evening since without missing, and he has not told a living soul that some evenings he stands there and the count runs in his head like a faucet somebody left on.

You have your own six pots. Somebody set them on your step, in kindness, and you have been careful with them and grateful out loud and quietly measuring them against the thing that got taken, every single day. You are holding two true things at once, a real gift in your hands and a real loss behind you, and nobody is asking you to drop one to carry the other. It is written in Habakkuk 3:18 that a man can joy in the God of his salvation while the stalls are standing empty, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been on that step at six in the evening with you the whole time, watching you count, and not once telling you to quit counting.

The prophet counted the empty stalls first

People quote the second half of this and skip the first, and skipping the first is what makes it sound like a slogan.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls:Habakkuk 3:17

That is an inventory. Item by item, out loud, every single empty place named specifically. No blossom on the fig. Nothing on the vines. The olive crop failed. Nothing in the fields. The fold empty. The stalls empty. He does not round it off, he does not skip the ones that hurt, and he does not say a word about how it could be worse.

Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:18

Now hear where that yet is standing. It is not standing on a full stall. It is standing in the doorway of an empty one, with the count still hanging in the air, and it is not correcting the count. He does not say the fig does not matter. He says the fig is bare and my joy is in God.

You are allowed to name every empty row out loud and rejoice in the same breath, because that is the order Habakkuk himself put them in. It is written in Habakkuk 3:17 and 3:18, the inventory first and the yet second, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a joy like that possible in a man standing on hot concrete with a plastic watering can, without asking him to pretend about the windrows.

Six is not four hundred, and God has not said it is

Here is the honest part, and I am not going to walk it back at the end.

Those six pots are not an orchard. They will not be an orchard. Nobody on this page is going to tell you the small thing is secretly the better thing, because that is a lie people tell to close a subject, and the subject is not closed. Four hundred trees were taken and six pots are not a trade. If someone has told you God swapped one for the other and you should be pleased with the deal, they have made Him into a man who moves stock around, and that is not who He is.

Restored is not another word for replaced. Replaced would mean a smaller orchard handed to a man who is exactly as hollowed out as he was in February. Restored means the grower on the step is being put back together while the pots are just what they are, six real living things that are actually his.

You have something genuinely alive in your keeping and it does not have to be a replacement to be real. The word says a man may joy in the God of his salvation with the fold empty, which is the whole point of Habakkuk 3:18, and it is the same Spirit who carried the prophet through that inventory who is standing with you while you do yours.

And the anger stays. If what rises in you when you think of that machine going down the rows is anger, keep it. It is not a defect in you and it is not something to get cleaned up before God will move. Nobody here is going to ask you to feel differently about February.