A Cutting in a Jar

The jar used to have apricot jam in it and the label has come off except for one stubborn corner.

It is the last Saturday in April, about ten in the morning, and she is out on the sunporch in her socks with a mug she has already reheated once. The sill runs the whole length of the room and gets everything the morning has. On it: a green plastic watering can, a saucer of seeds she meant to plant in March, and the jar.

In the jar, in about two inches of water gone slightly yellow, is a geranium cutting. She took it eleven days ago off the big red one by the front step, cut on the slant with a knife she had to go and find, stripped the bottom leaves the way her grandmother did. And this week it happened. Roots. Four of them, white and thick as thread, one of them already turning at the bottom of the glass because it has run out of room.

She turns the jar a quarter turn, which she does every morning, and stands there looking at it longer than a person needs to look at a jar.

Because of Thursday.

Thursday her nephew was at the table doing something to his phone and asked her, in that flat way nineteen-year-olds ask enormous questions, what she wanted to be like when she was old.

And she opened her mouth and what came out was: "Not bitter, anyway."

Then she thought about it, and added, "Not one of those people who talks about their health the whole time." And they both laughed and he went back to his phone and that was the end of it, and she has been carrying it around since Thursday like a stone in a shoe.

Because that is the whole answer. That is everything she has. Twenty six years of following Jesus and she can produce a beautiful, detailed, exhaustive list of what she does not want to be, and if you asked her to describe what she does want to be, in the positive, out loud, as a picture, she has nothing. Not-bitter. Not-complaining. Not-the-woman-she-is-afraid-of-becoming.

She looks at the roots in the yellow water.

Nobody is teaching that cutting to behave like a geranium. Nobody is correcting it. It is not being reminded of its faults. It is standing in water in a jam jar on a windowsill, and something is coming out of the bottom of it, and by June it will be in dirt by the front step making the same red flowers as the plant it came off.

And I think that is why you clicked on this. You know exactly what you would like to stop. You could write it down in under a minute. And the other question, the one your nephew asked, goes somewhere in you that has no words in it at all.

The list of what to stop is always longer

I want to start with that list, the one that only runs in one direction.

There is a reason for that and it is not a defect in you. Faults are visible. They have edges and dates and consequences, and other people mention them. A woman knows what she said in the car on Tuesday. Nobody has ever taken a woman aside to describe, in detail, the shape of the person being formed in her, so of course the negative column is full and the other one is blank.

But look at what happens when the negative column is the whole plan. If Christlikeness is a list of things to stop, then the finished product of the Christian life is a person who does nothing wrong. Silence. An empty column. Nobody has ever wanted to sit next to that person, and God did not send His Son so we could all become carefully managed nothing.

Romans 8 says we are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, and the conforming is the Spirit's work and not ours.

You are being grown into somebody rather than out of something, and that changes what the goal even is. The target has a face and a voice and hands, and it was never an empty column.

And I will say the other half plainly, because this is where pages like this usually go wrong. Nothing here is a checklist and nothing here is behavior management. If you finish this and feel you have been handed a standard to hit, I have written it badly.

You have not been enrolled in anything today. Galatians 3 asks whether, having begun in the Spirit, we are now made perfect by the flesh, and the written question expects the answer no, so the growing was never yours to administer in the first place.

Partakers of the nature, not students of the behavior

Now here is the sentence, and I want you to notice how strange it is.

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.2 Peter 1:4

Partakers of the nature. Not imitators of the conduct. Not students of the ethics. Peter says something of God's own nature is given, shared, imparted into a person, and the promises are the pipe it comes through.

Think about the jar again. That cutting is not trying to be a geranium. It could not try if it wanted to. It is a geranium, taken off a geranium, and what it is doing in the water is not effort, it is drawing. It puts out roots because of what it is, and then it draws through them, and then it does what the parent plant does, and the red flower in June is not an achievement. It is a nature arriving at its own conclusion.

You have been given a nature you did not manufacture, and it is not on trial. Second Peter 1 says the divine nature is given through the promises, and His Spirit is what joins a person to Christ so the giving is real rather than poetic, so what is in you now came from Him and not from your discipline.

That is why the change on this shelf never comes out of gritted teeth. Teeth can produce conduct. Teeth cannot produce a nature. You can hold a smile at a family lunch through pure will and every person at the table will still feel exactly what is underneath it, and you will drive home tired and no different.

You are drawing from a root that goes back into Christ Himself, and that is where the family resemblance comes from. John 15 says He is the vine and we are the branches and apart from Him we can do nothing, and it is the Spirit who keeps the sap moving in that written picture, which is why the fruit is never the branch's accomplishment.

So what is He actually like

Right. If the answer is a Person and not a column, then let us be concrete, because "be like Jesus" is a fog if nobody says what He is like.

He is the man who was asleep in the back of a boat in a storm because He was tired, and slept well. He is the one who stopped a whole crowd for one woman who touched Him and made everybody wait while she told Him the entire story, and He called her daughter. He is the one who noticed the widow's two coins in a room full of people not noticing anything. He is the one who cooked breakfast on a beach, on a fire He built Himself, for the men who had run out on Him three days earlier, and did not open with the subject.

That is what you are being grown into. Rest in a storm. Unhurried attention to one person. Eyes that find the two coins. And breakfast, on the sand, for people who let you down.

You are being made like the one who made a fire on a beach for his friends who ran. Romans 8 puts conformity to the image of the Son at the center of the whole thing, and the same chapter names the Spirit as the one at work in us, so the resemblance being grown in you is that resemblance and not a generic improvement.

And if the reason you cannot picture yourself becoming anything good is that something has gone dark, please get a person alongside you. Reaching a human being is not a step away from Him. It is very often the room He walks into. A doctor, because a body running on empty will hand you a picture of your future that is chemistry and not truth. A counselor, and one who can stay with the part of this that is older than Thursday. A pastor. And if what comes at night has moved past regret and settled into a flat certainty that there is nothing in you worth growing, do not stand at that sill on your own tonight: call or text 988, or a crisis line, and let a real person stay with you until it lifts.