Blisters From Tying In

His hands have gone by the second row of canes, and it is not yet seven in the morning.

The plot is a strip of gray soil the length of a bus, and he has staked every plant on it as if it were about to make a run for it. Tomatoes tied at four points. Beans lashed to their wigwam so tightly the string has cut into the stem. He has a schedule for watering and a chart for feeding and a notebook, an actual notebook, in which he records what has come up and what has not, and mostly what has not. The retired couple three plots down are drinking tea out of a flask on an upturned crate, and their beans are climbing whatever they feel like, and he cannot look at them without something in his jaw going tight.

He took early retirement two years ago to make his life count for God. That was the phrase, and he meant it, and he has been counting ever since. He started a men's breakfast that six people came to and then three. He offered to run the church garden and then the church noticeboard and then the ride schedule, and each one he threw himself at with the same string and the same four points of tying, and each one, somehow, produced less than the effort. He is not lazy. He has never been lazy for a day of his life. He is worn through, and this morning, with a blister opening under his thumb as he ties in a stem that did not need tying, he says out loud, to nobody, "I have been trying to produce something and I am worn out from it."

You know that string. Your plot of ground might be a house or a job or a small church or a family, but you have been tying in and staking and feeding and charting, and you have been calling it faithfulness, and it has left your hands like his. Look at them. And now let me ask you the only question I actually came to ask this morning. When did you last see a branch strain?

The branch is not the one who grows

Stay with the question, because everything turns on it. A branch does not strain. It has never once, in the history of vines, tried to bear grapes. It does one thing, and it does it without effort, and it is the same thing whether the season is kind or cruel: it stays attached. Everything else, the sap and the leaf and the fruit, comes up through it from somewhere it did not make and cannot manufacture. The branch is not the source. It is the place the fruit shows up.

Now hear the difference between fruit and output, because it is the whole of what has been wearing you out. Output is what you push out. It is measured, and it is yours, and it comes from your hands, and it costs exactly what it costs. Fruit is what grows on you when you are joined to Him. It is His, and it comes up through you, and you cannot force a single grape of it, and here is the mercy: you were never asked to. You have been carrying a job that was never given to you, and the vine has been doing the real one the whole time. That is not my opinion. It is what Jesus said, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing on a branch that has finally stopped pushing.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.John 15:4

Cannot. Not "will find it hard to". The branch cannot bear fruit by itself. Jesus does not say that as a rebuke; He says it as a relief, to men who were about to lose Him and were terrified about what they were supposed to produce next. He tells them the one thing they can do and the one thing they cannot, and the thing they can do is stay. You have been given the staying and never the growing. John 15:4 puts the cannot on the branch and the bearing on the vine, and the Holy Spirit is the sap that does the carrying.

Distant is not detached

Now the fear I know is under the blisters, because I have felt it in my own hands. You feel far from Him. Two years of straining and you feel drier than when you began, and somewhere in you a sentence has been forming: if I were really attached, I would feel it, and I would be producing. Hear me carefully. Feeling distant is not the same as being detached. A branch in February looks dead. It looks like it has nothing to do with the vine at all, and it is as joined to it in February as it is in September. The joining is not a feeling; it is a fact about where you are. You are in Him, and He is in you, and that is true this morning on the gray soil whether or not you can feel a single thing. Scripture says that whoever confesses Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God (1 John 4:15), and it is His Spirit who is the seal of that (Ephesians 1:13), and a seal is not something you feel; it is something that holds.

Nor did the barren stretch come to teach you a lesson. Let me take that one off you too. You are not being disciplined by dryness, and the two years were not sent to make a point. God is not a vinedresser who starves branches to improve them. What is written is that He is a Father who gives the Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13), and the Spirit is the sap, and the sap does not run better through a branch that has been strained.

So what does abiding actually look like this week, since it is not a technique and I will not give you steps? It looks like a man on an upturned crate with a flask, doing nothing, for ten minutes, joined. That is not a plan. It is not a discipline schedule. It is one deliberate stretch of not producing, in His company, and Scripture calls it remaining, and the Holy Spirit is who you are remaining in.