Twenty Years and No List

The last week of August, and her mother's yard smells of overripe figs.

She is in the green folding chair under the tree with a glass of lemonade going warm on the arm of it, and a paper plate over the top of the glass so the wasps stay out. School starts a week from Monday. Twenty-three kindergartners, half of whom have never held a pencil, and she has been doing this long enough now that the week before does not frighten her the way it used to.

Her mother is inside with the radio on, doing something to a chicken.

In her back pocket, folded twice, is a half sheet of paper from the Wednesday night group. At the end everybody got one. Between now and next week, write down three ways God has changed you. Bring it back and we will read them out.

She has been under this tree for two hours.

The first hour she was not really trying. She weeded the pot by the step and moved the hose and picked up the fallen figs the wasps had already opened. The second hour she sat down and got the pen out, and here is what is on the paper.

Nothing. One line, started, crossed out.

She has been in church twenty years. She was baptized in a lake at twenty-two with her sandals in her hand. She has taught the four year olds, run the coffee, sat in the parking lot afterward with a woman whose marriage was ending. She reads. She prays, mostly in the car, which she suspects does not count and has never asked anybody about.

And she cannot name one thing that is different.

Not one. She thinks about who she was at twenty-two, and the woman she can see is impatient, quick with an opinion, afraid of a certain kind of silence. And she thinks about the woman in the folding chair, and it is the same woman, only tired, with a lesson plan to write and a bad knee.

A fig drops off the tree behind her and lands with that soft sound they make. She does not turn around.

And the paper stays folded in your pocket too, because you were handed the same question at some point. Maybe out loud in a group, maybe by your own head at two in the morning. Name what has changed. And whatever came to you was thin, or it was nothing, and you have been carrying that quietly ever since without telling anybody how empty the page was.

A list is the wrong instrument for this

Let me get one thing out of the way at the start, because I am not going to leave it hanging over the rest of this.

A short list is not a bad sign. A blank one is not either. I am not going to tell you what a good answer to that question looks like, or what other people wrote on their halves of the paper, because the moment that becomes the standard the whole thing has turned into homework, and God did not hand you a rubric on the way into the vine.

You have been growing in a place you were never given a window into, and the blank page is not the verdict on it. John 15 puts the growing in the hands of a gardener and never once asks the branch for a progress report; the Spirit produces the fruit, which is what Galatians 5 means by calling it the fruit of the Spirit rather than the fruit of your effort. A branch has no idea what it looks like. It has never seen itself.

Think about what a list can actually hold. A list holds new things. Added things. Things that arrived with an edge you could feel and a date you could put beside them.

And most of what a gardener does is not addition. You were worked on by subtraction for years, and subtraction does not show up in a column of what is new. That is written into the vine passage itself, and it is the Spirit and not your recall who has been doing the quiet cutting, in seasons you slept through and would not be able to date now if somebody paid you.

What the gardener does to a branch already bearing

Here is the line the whole shelf sits on, and it is about a branch that is already producing.

and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.John 15:2

Purge there means clean. Prune. Cut back the wood that is taking sap and giving nothing, so the branch can carry what it was made to carry. And notice who is holding the blade. Not the branch. The branch is not asked to identify what needs to go, schedule the cut, or evaluate the work afterward.

You have a gardener, and He has been in this tree for twenty years with His own hands. His word says it is the vinedresser who does the cleaning, and the same Spirit who makes any branch bear anything has been at this whether or not one person ever wrote it down. Twenty years is a long time to have somebody's hands in you.

Now think about what pruning leaves behind. It leaves an absence. There is a thing you used to say in an argument that you have not said in six years, and you cannot tell me when you stopped, because nothing happened on the day you stopped. There was no moment. There is a particular kind of gossip you would have been in the middle of at thirty and now find you have nothing to add to. There is a phone call you used to rehearse for two days before making.

None of that goes on a list. Nobody can write down a thing that is not there. It would mean remembering the shape of a woman you stopped being, and nobody keeps that.

You have absences in you that cost the gardener something to make. Scripture gives Him that title, vinedresser, and it is His Spirit and not your memory who lifted those things out of you across years that looked entirely ordinary from the chair you were sitting in.

The people who can see it are not you

There is a woman inside that house doing something to a chicken who could fill that half sheet of paper in about four minutes.

That is not sentiment. It is how sight works. Nobody alive is worse placed to see change in you than yourself, because nobody gets to stand outside their own life and look in, and every version of a person felt, from the inside, exactly like this one.

Your mother has an angle on you that nobody else in the world has. So does the friend from the old job. So does the woman in that parking lot, who could describe exactly who sat down beside her that afternoon, and who would be surprised at the question.

If the emptiness of that page has gone somewhere past discouragement, though, do not sit under the fig tree alone with it. A person showing up to help is God moving, and not God being replaced. A doctor, if the flatness has got into your body and your sleep. A counselor. Your pastor, or one friend with the whole of it rather than the version you give the group. And if the nights have started making an argument for you not being around, reach somebody today rather than tomorrow: 988 anywhere in this country, or a crisis line in your own state, and a person near enough to drag a second chair across the grass. None of that is beside the point. Out under that tree it is the point.

You are seen all the way through by the One who has been doing the work, and He has never needed you to corroborate it. Scripture says one plants and another waters and God gives the growth, and His Spirit gave that growth without sending anybody a receipt.