Under the Graft Line

Fourteen people in the old orchard behind the rec center, and a thermos of coffee on the tailgate of somebody's station wagon that everybody keeps wandering back to. Ruth runs the second Saturday of the month. She carries a clipboard she never looks at, and she has a habit of putting her hand flat on a branch before she says anything about it. A boy of about nine is going round with the wheelbarrow, collecting what people cut, being paid in cookies.

Gordon has the Bramley at the far end. He always has the Bramley, because eleven years ago he said he did not mind taking the awkward one, and in a place like this that is a contract for life. He is not pruning it today. He is doing the base of it, the way he does every single year: a ring of whip thin shoots coming up out of the ground around the trunk, thirty or forty of them, straight as canes, going nowhere useful. An hour with the loppers and a knee in the wet grass and they are gone. Next spring they are back, and there are always a few more than last time.

Ruth comes down the row with two mugs and stands looking at the pile he has made.

"You know those aren't the tree," she says.

He looks up at her.

"Under the graft." She crouches and puts a finger on a knuckle of scar tissue a hand's width above the soil, where one wood was joined to another before either of them was ever planted here. "Everything above that line is the Bramley. Everything below it is whatever they grew it on, and that is what keeps sending those up. You can take them off every spring for the rest of your life. You will never once touch what makes them."

It is a sentence about a tree, and it goes into a man like a splinter, on an ordinary Saturday, with a mug in one hand and a nine year old asking whether the barrow can go now.

Because you have a thing you cut back. You know the one. Not the interesting sins, the one nobody would think to put on a list, the reaction that is up and out of you before you have decided anything at all, and you have been taking it off at ground level since before your children started school. You have got fast at it. Some seasons you have got so fast that nobody in the house knows it came up. And every spring, without fail, out of ground your tools have never reached, there it is again.

What the loppers were never going to reach

Let me say the honest half first, because a message that will not say it is not worth the time it takes to read.

The cutting was not nothing. Twenty years of catching a thing before it landed on somebody is twenty years of real work, and a good deal of it was mercy done at speed by a person nobody was thanking. Keep that. What is finishing today is not the work. What is finishing is the belief that the work was ever going to reach the bottom of you, because it was not, and some part of you has known that for a long time and has been ashamed of knowing it.

Here is what is true of you while you stand there with the loppers in your hand. You are not a man with bad stock under him and you are not a woman who came out wrong. Scripture puts the reach of God far below the reach of anybody's tools, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the pressure of your own effort, who takes that word down into the ground it describes.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.Hebrews 4:12

Read what that verse actually claims. Not that God's word is inspiring. Not that it is true, though it is. That it goes to the join. Soul and spirit, joints and marrow, the places where two things are fused so closely that no instrument any of us owns can get between them and say where one stops and the other starts. That is precisely your problem with the thing that will not move. You cannot tell where it ends and you begin. Ground level is as deep as a person can see, and cutting at ground level for twenty years is what anybody would do.

And the writer of Hebrews does not leave it there, which matters enormously, because a word that only exposes is a scalpel and nobody wants one of those in the dark. Four verses later he sends the reader who has just been laid open to the throne of grace, to receive mercy. The same passage that says nothing in you is hidden says come and be met. Exposure and mercy in one breath, from one God, in one chapter.

So take this in the middle of your day, wherever the reading has caught you. You have a God who is already working at the depth you have never been able to get to, and He has not gone quiet about it. The word says He is living and active down there; His Spirit is the one making that living rather than merely printed. Nothing about the length of this has made Him lose interest in it.

Two things tend to stand between a person and that, and both of them are old.

The first is the suspicion that a thing this old must mean something is spoiled at the bottom of you. Under the graft, bad wood. It is a natural reading of a tree and a terrible reading of a person, and it is not what Scripture says about anybody in Christ. The picture in that orchard is good for exactly one thing, which is showing you that what shows is fed from lower down than your reach. Push it any further than that and it starts lying to you.

The second is quieter and more common in people who have been at this a long while. It is the suspicion that God has already made His attempt on this. That there was a year when He was moving on it, and you did not co-operate well enough, and He has since turned His attention to more responsive material. Hear the truth against that, because it is not a mood, it is written. You were bought at the cross entire, not in the parts that were easy, and the Spirit given to you was not issued on a trial. The depth of Him is not conditional on how the surface has been going.

I have spent my life around old texts, and there is a habit from that world worth borrowing here. When a manuscript is damaged, the first discipline is not repair. It is to stop handling it. Every honest attempt to fix a page with the wrong hands takes something off it that no one gets back. The work that saves it happens at a level of skill and patience the owner does not have, and the owner's part, the whole of it, is to bring the thing to the one who can and to keep their hands still. That is not defeat. It is the beginning of the only process that was ever going to work.

And one more thing belongs here rather than in a footnote, because it is exactly the sort of thing a careful person leaves unsaid. Bringing this to God has never meant carrying it by yourself. A doctor, a counselor, a pastor who will hear the unedited version: these are hands God uses, and reaching for one of them is Him at work rather than a substitute for Him. If what comes up out of that ground is landing on somebody in your house, do not set out to manage that alone. And if the quiet has gone past regret into not wanting to be here at all, 988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and it will take a text as readily as a call: use it before this Saturday is over, or a crisis line closer to the rec center, and tell one person near you tonight. That is no departure from the subject. Under the graft line it is the subject.

You have help nearer to you than your own hands, and you have had it through every one of those twenty springs. Jesus gave His Spirit the name Helper, and the written word calls Him the God of all comfort rather than a God who waits at a distance for a tidier applicant. A person who asks for help is not stepping outside what God is doing here. They are stepping into the middle of it.