You've Been Measuring Wrong

[Sitting outside at a Café, in the middle of a forrest]

A few weeks ago, I wrote you a letter about routine… and how even freedom becomes a routine if you live in it long enough. Now, near the end of that letter, I said something I truly believed.

I said something like…

“Do not judge your life only by what is changing… judge it by what is growing.”

Then a reader wrote me back in an email. They did not argue with me. They just asked me a question. They took my thought one step further than I had taken it… and this was a question I could not ignore.

So today, I want to think out loud with you about the question she asked me.

Here is what she said in her email:

“Yes. Judge your life by what is growing. But growth alone is hard to trust. Because grass grows. Weeds grow. A garden grows. And a garden is not judged by the mere presence of growth.

It is judged by whether what is growing... is what was meant to be planted.

So what is the measure?”

That last line… that last line made me think… and guess what?! She was right.

You can absolutely grow in the wrong direction.

So after a few emails back and forth… I sat with her question.

What is the measure?

And the longer I sat with it, the more I saw something hiding inside the word itself.

Because there are two kinds of measuring.

And I promise you, all of us reach for the wrong one.

The first one is comparison.

Comparison is a beast… because you start holding your life up against someone else life.

Man… I remember doing that for years to myself.

And you know what’s stranger about that practice… it never ends. It never satisfy. Because at the end of each day of comparison… we still go to bed empty. Why? Because comparison is a real mental, emotional, psychological race with no finish line.

I believe one of the root problems within humanity is that we are always trying to measure ourselves against something or with something. This is the kind of measuring that destroy us internally. I think the reason we reach for this type of measure first is because humans naturally feel like they need something external to measure against. When the truth is… you really don’t.

But there is a second kind of measuring. And this is the one I believe the reader was actually trying to pull out of me.

The second one is inspection.

This type of measure is very interesting to me because in order to inspect something, it really takes work. Inspection is what a real gardener does. This gardener does not stand at the fence ranking his field against his neighbor’s. Instead… he kneels down, he gets close and he puts his hands in his own soil. He examines his own fruit.

But check this out… Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that had not produced in three years. Now the owner of the vineyard was done with this tree and wanted it to be cut down. He said:

“Why is it even taking up the ground.”

But thee gardener saw this situation differently.

He told the owner give it one more year. Let me dig around it. Let me put fertilizer on it. Let me tend to it.

Man, this got me so excited because I want you to notice what the gardener did not do. He did not compare the fig tree against the other trees.

This is what he did… his measure was to inspect. He got close. He gave it grace. He gave it time. And he fed it.

I do believe one can truly evaluate growth by doing this type of inspection. Grass grows, weeds grow, a garden grows. If the grass over grows and the weeds sprout all over the garden that does not change the overall purpose of what was planted. That’s when our job as tenders of the garden or keepers of the garden is to inspect. Not compare.

That’s when we prune. That’s when we cut. That’s when we uproot. That’s when we trim. That’s when we have to do the ugly, dirty work in our lives or in this case the garden. We just have to cultivate, have the hard conversations, make the difficult changes, water what needs to be watered, remove who needs to be removed etc.

The moment we see things growing that don’t align with what was intended to be cultivated is where we do the hard work. Not the time we measure against what’s growing.

---

So let me finally answer the question.

What is the measure?

The measure is not the garden next door. The measure is the seed.

What was planted in you... that is what everything growing in you gets held against. Not what is growing in someone else. Not how fast someone else is moving. Not how visible another person harvest is.

When the gardener kneels down and holds the fruit in his hand, he is not asking, is this better than the neighbor’s? He is asking one question only.

Is this what I planted?

That is inspection. Measuring what is growing... against what was intended.

Maybe you kneeled down in your own life this year and did not like what you found. Weeds everywhere. Things growing you never planted. Whole season overgrown.

Hear me... the weeds do not changed what was planted.

Overgrowth can cover a garden. But it will never replace what was planted. The purpose underneath the mess is still the purpose. That is why the gardener said give it one more year. He was not being sentimental. He knew what was in the ground.

So this week... I want you to get off the fence.

Stop measuring your life against fields you were never assigned to. Unfollow the people who you keep comparing your life too.

Kneel down in your own soil. Pull up what you never planted. Water what you did plant. And give yourself the same three things the gardener gave the fig tree... grace, time, and another year.

I want you to carry this one question with you into your week:

Is what is growing in me... the same as what was planted in me?

She was right. Growth alone is not the measure.

The seed is.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

p.s. To the reader who sent me the question that became this letter... thank you. You did not just read the letter. You stepped into it. The garden is better because you are in it.