When one of our pencil hollies began turning brown in this scorcher of an August, I assumed it was getting fried by the afternoon heat.

That didn’t calculate, however, because the three other hollies, planted at the same time five months ago, are doing just fine.

So I started digging around the base of the tree with my fingers. I was expecting one of two extremes, either bone-dry dirt from the heat or mud from my watering, but much to my amazement, the dirt looked completely normal, as healthy as it’s been since we mixed organic material with the dirt this past December.

One good thing: Little green buds are emerging at the base. With my extensive expertise, I figure that is a good thing. Yet still, I await the fate of this nice little anchor in the back right corner of our developing garden.

This is one of the struggles, and one of the joys, of owning a home. It can turn into uninformed activity very quickly. A browning tree can trigger actions like more water, more plant food, more fertilizer—all human movement that can make us feel we are at least responding to what might feel like a developing failure on our part.

A problem presented itself. Now fix it.

The pencil holly has forced me to confront a character trait I don’t always recognize quickly enough, and even when I do, I stay stubborn and try to plow through it. New homeownership can produce a peculiar impetuousness, making a person believe that every new problem must be fixed by his hands and his hands only.

That confidence is not necessarily bad, of course. Having completed many jobs I once knew nothing about, I have learned things on the fly that I can be proud of. A home can force a person out of learned helplessness, sending him toward instructions, tools, trial and error, and finally a competence he didn’t know he possessed. God has given me opportunities to learn how to improve and maintain the place He let us borrow from Him, and refusing those opportunities out of fear or misplaced prudence would be a failure on my part all unto itself.

Some of these successes, however, can make an amateur feel equally qualified for jobs outside his jurisdiction. Each finished project becomes evidence that the next one can be conquered too, even when the next one requires entirely different knowledge. The risks may also be more serious—even dangerous—than a few loose parts or a browning pencil holly. Emboldened by what we duct taped yesterday, we can approach the next issue—and there are always issues—without admitting that we have crossed the threshold from innocent, teachable inexperience into serious, perhaps even dangerous, presumption.

A mistaken diagnosis on this pencil holly may cost us the original forty dollars, another forty for its replacement, and an hour or two of work. But that is, in the grand scheme, practically nothing. The same presumption can have much more painful consequences when a shovel strikes buried wiring, or when our fingers begin fiddling with electrical work that can kill far more than a plant.

At that point, good, honest movement no longer merely quiets our anxiety or flatters our pride. It can damage the home, injure the homeowner, or endanger someone else. This is why I will be getting help for those fans we need under the patio and in and around the house.

The lesson is not to hire a handyman for every difficult job, no. That would mean having to give up much of the growth homeownership has tilled in me, and simply put, it isn’t healthy inaction. It is actually quite effeminate for a man to quit before he even starts something as a rule. But there is indeed a line, and it exists somewhere between recognizing that you’ve never done this but I can learn, and being tone deaf to the fact that not everything can be figured out on the fly. One of those begins with humility and authentic enterprise in cooperation with God; the other assumes that Rocky-like determination will be that one virtue that pushes you toward victory every time.

Sometimes—in fact, much of the time—prudence is the greater virtue.

For now, little green buds remain visible at the base of the holly, giving Plant Man, M.D., reason to postpone surgery. Homeownership is teaching me that I can do much more than I once imagined, sure, but this forty-dollar shrub (tree!) may be teaching me not to imagine I can take every call.

RELATED: HOME RULE: Fat Oak in a Little Coat

Thank you for reading The Hayride!