Trimming the Same Branch

The loppers live on a nail inside the shed door, and she does not have to look for them.

It is the third week of May and the grass is wet to the ankle, and she is out at the fence line before the sun has cleared the ridge because she does not want to be seen doing this. There is nobody to see her. She does it early anyway. That has been true for about thirty years.

The tree is an old one. Somebody planted it before she was born, and it still makes more apples than two people can use, and every summer she gives most of them away in grocery sacks. It is a good tree. She wants that said first.

Low on the trunk, about the height of her hip, there is a knot in the bark the size of a fist. That is not a disease and it is not damage. It is a callus. It is what a tree grows over a place that has been cut a great many times.

And coming out of that knot, straight up, pale green and already as thick as her thumb, is the shoot.

She sets the loppers on it and takes it off flush, the way her father showed her. It comes away easy. She carries it to the burn pile at the edge of the yard and drops it there, and the wet has come through her shoes, and the birds are going in the fence row like nothing at all has happened.

She has done this every spring since she was thirty four.

She could tell you the years she thought she had it beaten. There was a stretch of four in a row when nothing came up out of that knot and she stopped watching for it, and the fifth spring it came back thicker than it had ever been. There was the year she left it, on purpose, to see what it would do, and by August she could not see the fence.

And you know your own branch. It is not on a tree, and you were doing it a long time before this morning. You have cut it out of yourself so many times you have a callus where you cut. Maybe it is a mouth thing. Maybe it is what happens at eleven at night when the house is quiet. Maybe nobody in your life knows about it at all, and you have carried it out to the burn pile alone, early, before anybody was up, for thirty years.

What comes back has something feeding it

I want to say something about that callus first, because a callus is not shameful. A callus is the record of a woman who kept showing up. Nobody grows a knot that size by being lazy about it.

So let us be clear. Every one of those cuts was real, and the tree is genuinely better for the pruning. And not one of them ever reached the thing sending the shoot up.

That is not a failure of technique. It is where the shoot lives. It comes up out of the trunk, from wood connected to a root system that goes out under the grass further than the tree is tall, and no tool held at hip height is going to get anywhere near it.

The word says out of the heart come the things that come out of a person, and the Spirit of God is the one who works down at that level. You have been cutting at the height a person can reach, and that was never the wrong instinct, it was just the wrong depth.

I do not say that to take the last thirty springs away from you. Cut the shoot. Keep cutting it. There is nothing holy about letting a thing run wild in the name of waiting on God. But do not go on believing the cutting is the cure, because it has told you plainly, every spring for thirty years, that it is not.

It is written that the Lord searches the heart and tries the reins, and His Spirit does that searching in a place a pair of loppers was never going to reach. You are known at a depth you have never been able to work at, and the knowing is not against you.

The axe is laid to the root, and it is not in your hand

Now here is the sentence I actually came to bring you, and it is John the Baptist standing in the river with his voice up.

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.Matthew 3:10

Read where the tool is. Not on the branches. Not at hip height. At the root, which is under the ground, which is the one place a woman with loppers has never been able to get to.

And read whose hand it is in. Not yours. That whole scene is about the arrival of Someone who does what the crowd standing in the water could not do for themselves, and the fire in it is His business and not your assignment. You are standing in front of a God whose ordinary way of working is root work, and He has never asked you to do the digging. Matthew 3:10 puts the axe at the root before anybody in that river had done a thing, and it is His Spirit and not the sharpness of your tool that goes down to where the shoot is fed.

Let me also take one worry off you while we are here. Nothing in this asks you to tell anybody what your branch is. Not a group, not a friend, not a person on a stage. If God moves you to say it out loud to somebody safe, that is His to arrange. You have a God who already knows the whole root system and did not learn about it from your confession. It is written that He knew our substance while we were being made in secret, and the Spirit searches the deep things, which means there is nothing down there you have to go first and explain to Him.

And nothing in this is a curse laid on your house, or a spirit that took up residence in you, or something running down the family because your grandmother had it too. It is a root. Roots are ordinary. God deals with roots.

No key, no missing verse, no clever prayer

Here is the other thing I want out of your way, permanently.

There is no key. There is no verse you have not found yet, no prayer worded the right way, no conference, no book, no morning routine that unlocks the ground under that tree. If there were, the whole thing would rest on you being clever enough to find it, and you have already been diligent for thirty years, and diligence is not the missing ingredient in your life.

You were never one insight away from this, and the work has been going on down there without waiting on your insight. That is what Scripture means when it says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and it is His Spirit doing the working, which is the reason a woman with no new idea this morning is not behind.

And I want to say a plain thing here in the middle, in daylight, not tucked at the bottom. If the branch is doing damage to you, or to somebody else living in that house, or if it has a hold on your body or your sleep, then bringing a person into it is God's own way of working and not a substitute for Him. A doctor, because bodies are in this. A counselor, who can sit with the whole of it and has heard worse than yours before lunch. Your pastor. And if the hours after dark have started turning toward wanting out of your own life, call or text 988 this evening rather than in the morning, or the crisis line nearest this fence line, and have somebody sitting on the step beside you before dark. Help is not the opposite of trusting Him. It is very often the shape of His answer.

You have help coming toward you in more than one shape, and not one of those shapes is a failure. The word says that in the multitude of counselors there is safety, and it is the same Spirit who hands out gifts to a doctor and to a pastor and to a friend who answers the phone late.