You Cannot See Roots

Wet soil in old paint tins, and the sharp green smell of the leaves when you brush them going past.

That is the balcony every evening in July. Six tins, one broken bucket, and a tomato plant in each that he grew from seed because it seemed like the kind of thing a person does. He waters them when he gets in. He turns the tins so they get the light. He has read more than any reasonable man should about what these plants want and he has provided all of it.

And for eleven days in the middle of June nothing happened at all.

He is not exaggerating. He went out every evening and looked and there was the same amount of plant as the night before, and on about the fourth evening he found himself crouching down to look at the soil closely, as if the soil were going to explain itself. On the seventh he said out loud to a bucket, all right, what are you doing.

Underneath, in the dark, the roots were going down. That is what those eleven days were. That is the only thing they could have been, because on the twelfth the whole plant lifted, and by August he was giving them away to people who did not want them.

He knows this about tomatoes. He would explain it to you patiently. He has never once applied it to himself.

Because on the same balcony, most evenings, he is running a different calculation. Eleven years since the night it all became real to him. Eleven years of turning up, of reading, of trying. And this afternoon his son said something at the wrong moment and the same voice came out of him that has been coming out of him since he was nineteen. Same volume. Same speed. Word for word, almost, the thing his father used to say.

Eleven years, and the temper still gets there first.

So he stands on the balcony with the hose in his hand, smelling wet soil, and thinks the thing he has thought a hundred times. It is not working. Or it is working on everybody else and not on me. Something in me is slower than it is supposed to be, and I have stopped being able to tell whether anything is happening at all.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have your own version of the eleven years, and you have a specific thing you would name if I asked. Not a general failing. A particular reaction that arrives before you do, and that you have prayed about more times than you would like to say, and that turned up again last week and made you tired in a way that is hard to describe.

Put the hose down. Nobody is inspecting you here.

The farmer who does not know how

Jesus told a very short story that almost never gets preached, and it is the most freeing thing in the Gospels for a person like you.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.Mark 4, verses 26 and 27

Stay on that last phrase, because Jesus put it there deliberately and it is doing all the work.

He knows not how.

The farmer is not lazy. He scattered the seed, he is up every day, he is doing what farmers do. What he cannot do is see the mechanism. He does not experience the growing. There is no evening on which he stands at the edge of the field and feels the wheat lengthening. The entire process he is depending on happens below the surface, out of his sight, on a timetable that is not his and cannot be inspected by digging it up.

And Jesus says: that is what the kingdom of God is like in a person.

You have growth going on in you that you were never built to observe. It is written that the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how (Mark 4:27), with the not knowing put there by Jesus deliberately. The Holy Spirit is working at the depth of roots rather than at the level you can audit.

Now hear what that does to the accounting you have been running on your balcony.

You have been standing at the edge of the field looking for evidence. That is not faithlessness, it is love, and it is the very thing that makes you tired. But you have made yourself the inspector of a process Jesus said the farmer cannot see. Of course you cannot tell whether anything is happening. Neither could the man in the story, and Jesus did not treat that as a problem to be solved. He treated it as the nature of the thing.

The Holy Spirit is not doing His work at the level you can audit. He is doing it at the level of roots, and roots go down in the dark for as long as roots go down, and nothing above the soil moves an inch while it is happening.

You are being changed from one degree of glory to another while nothing visible moves. It is written that we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, and this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18), in the passive, with the work assigned elsewhere. The Holy Spirit does the transforming and does not hand you the timetable.

And I want to be careful with you here, because this is exactly where people get handed something harmful.

Nobody is putting a rate on you. There is no schedule you have fallen behind, no year by which the temper should have gone, no comparison being drawn between you and someone in your church who seems calmer. I have no idea what is happening in them either. Neither do they.

Nor is there a checklist. Fruit is not a form to be filled in, and the moment you turn it into one you have turned a living thing into an audit, and an audit has never grown anything in the history of the world.

You are carrying fruit that grows rather than a list that gets completed. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience (Galatians 5:22), and fruit is the word for a thing that ripens on its own time. The Holy Spirit grows it in you and never once asks you to score it.

And this too, because I know the fear underneath: the Holy Spirit did not step back from you after this afternoon. He is not a presence that withdraws over a bad reaction and returns when you have been good for a stretch. He was in the kitchen while it was happening. He is on the balcony now.

You are held after this afternoon exactly as you were held before it. It is written that He who began a good work in you brings it to completion (Philippians 1:6), with the beginning and the finishing both in His hands. The Holy Spirit did not step back over a bad reaction and He is not waiting out a stretch of good behavior.