The Tree He Never Ate From

The one at the corner of the wall is the biggest and it went in the year his grandfather turned fifty-one.

Everybody in the family knows the story because the old man told it at every meal for about thirty years, and told it badly, and told it as a joke against himself. He planted eleven that spring. The others were young stock; that one was a whip that came from a cousin and was, in his own words, more of a stick than a tree.

He was fifty-one. He died at sixty-eight.

An olive planted from a whip fruits properly at somewhere between seven and twelve years, depending on how it is treated, and his grandfather never once had a jar of oil from that tree.

Everybody laughed when he told it. He laughed himself.

His grandson is thirty-eight now and he thinks about it more than he tells anybody.

Because he has a pattern and he has known about it for about five years. He starts things and stops them at about the eighteen-month mark, and he stops them all in the same way, which is not dramatically: he simply notices one day that he has worked out roughly how long this is going to take, and that the answer is longer than he can see, and something in him goes quietly out.

The language he never learned. The thing with his brother he keeps deciding to be patient about and is not. Two years of a good practice that he let go without a decision.

And there is a tree at the corner of a wall with fruit on it that a man who never tasted it put in the ground when he was fifty-one.

The promise is a due season, not a date you can hold Him to

Let me say the fair thing about the eighteen months before anything else, because there has been quiet shame about it for five years and shame is a poor engine.

Nobody set out to be a person who stops. What you have is not weakness of character, it is an instinct that measures a job against a horizon and switches off when the job is longer, and that instinct is right about a great many things and keeps people out of debt and out of trouble. It is simply useless here.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: you are not required to see the end of a thing in order for the thing to be worth beginning. That is not my kind reading of a pattern, it is what stands written in Galatians, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line has been in front of an olive tree with you since you were a boy.

Read what Paul actually promises, and notice what he leaves out.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.Galatians 6:9

At the proper time. Not next spring. Not within a period that a man could put in a diary or hold anybody to.

He gives a certainty and withholds a date, deliberately, and he does it in a sentence about not getting tired. He knew exactly what tires people, and it is not effort. It is not knowing when.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a shorter horizon: the harvest is promised, and the timing is His, because the written word puts the certainty and the vagueness in the same sentence on purpose, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person going through the part they cannot see the end of.

Now let me say the thing about your grandfather that the family joke has been covering for thirty years.

He was fifty-one. He knew what olives do. A man who had grown up in that grove did not put a whip in the ground at fifty-one under any illusion about eating from it.

He was not being funny and he was not being careless. He did the arithmetic and planted it anyway, and then he made it into a joke against himself at meals for thirty years because that is how men of that kind carry something serious in public.

And here is the piece that ought to reach you: you have eaten from it. Repeatedly, for years, without once counting it as an answer to anything.

What is written says a person who sows reaps in due season, and the Holy Spirit is not restricted to the sower when He hands out the crop.

And the guard, because this article is not here to hand you a rate: nobody is telling you how long anything should take, and nothing here says a fast change is a shallow one. Some things do move quickly and that is real and it is not a lesser kind of work. What is being taken off you is the rule that a thing must finish inside your own sightline to be worth starting.