Carrying Water to the Olive Trees

August, and it has not rained since the second week of May, and the hill is the color of a paper bag.

He starts at five because after seven the terraces are an oven. Two buckets, both hands, up the path, along the second terrace, one bucket poured at the base of each of the four old trees, back down, fill, up again. Nine trips. He does not stop for the ninth, because if he stops at eight he will not do the ninth, and he has never once not done the ninth.

His father did not do this. His grandfather did not do this. He knows that, and he has an answer ready for anybody who says it: things are different now, the springs are lower, you can see the difference in the leaves. He has said this out loud twice and both times it sounded, even to him, like a man explaining something to himself.

Because here is what he also knows, and has known since he was about eleven, when the old man who worked the next terrace showed him a stone that had been split by a root.

An olive root goes down twenty feet. Twenty. The tree at the end of his second terrace is older than the country, and its roots are somewhere under the hill where he has never been and will never go, in a dark he has no bucket for, drinking out of a table of water that a nine trip morning does not touch and could not touch.

He knows this. And he was up at five. And he will be up at five tomorrow.

Tonight the light has gone long and gold on the terraces and the leaves are doing the silver thing they do when the air moves, and he is sitting on the low wall with his hands hanging between his knees, too tired to go in, looking at four trees that were here before anybody wrote his family's name down anywhere.

You have been on that hill. Maybe not with buckets. Maybe with a phone, a checklist, a rule about how the day starts, a thing you do because you have decided that if you stopped, something would die. And you know, in the part of you that does not argue, that the thing you are keeping alive has roots you have never seen.

The tree that does not see the heat

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that gives a tired man a better watering schedule and calls it help. It is not help. Nine trips instead of eleven, or a different hour, or a hose, leaves him carrying, and the carrying is the injury. So there is no schedule coming out of this.

Jeremiah writes about a man who trusts the Lord, and he does not describe him as strong. He describes him as planted. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit (Jeremiah 17:8).

Read what the tree does. It spreads its roots. That is the whole of its activity, and it is not an effort, it is a direction. And then read what happens to it in a drought: it does not see when the heat comes. Not it survives the heat, not it endures the heat. It does not see it. The tree is drinking from something the weather does not reach.

You are planted by water that no August on this hill can lower. That is not poetry laid over a hard fact; Jeremiah 17:8 says the tree does not see when the heat comes, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that image is the water in it, which is why a man sitting on a wall too tired to go in is not as far from God as he feels.

And notice what the tree does not do. It does not carry anything. There is no bucket in the passage. The only movement in it is downward and it happens in the dark, under the hill, in a place the tree itself has never seen.

For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.Jeremiah 17:8

Abiding is a direction, not a discipline

Now John 15, because it says the same thing in another language.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me (John 15:4). A branch has no technique. It is not doing a thing that could be done better or more often. It is attached, and the sap moves, and something appears on it that it did not make.

That is why abiding cannot be turned into nine trips. The moment it becomes trips, the man is the water supply, and he is not, and he has never had enough water in him for a tree that old.

You have been attached through every dry week, including the ones that felt like nothing. John 15:4 makes abiding a place a person is in rather than a thing a person achieves, and the Spirit is the sap; a branch does not stop being attached on a morning when it cannot feel anything moving.

And that is the guardrail, said plainly on a wall in August: feeling dry is not evidence of being cut off. It is evidence that a man has been looking for water at the top of the soil, where he can see it, instead of twenty feet down where it actually is.

This is yours right now, sitting on that wall: roots already in water you have never seen and cannot manage. Colossians 2:7 says rooted and built up in Him, and both verbs in that phrase are things done to a person rather than by one; the same Spirit who bears witness that you belong to God (Romans 8:16) has been at the bottom of this hill the whole time.

What the nine trips are really about

Let me say the thing that is under the carrying, because it is not conscientiousness.

It sounds like this: if I stopped, I would find out whether any of this was ever really alive, and I would rather be tired than find that out. That is the fear on the hill, and it is the reason the ninth trip is non negotiable, and he has never said it to his wife or to anybody else.

You were never the water supply, and nothing has been depending on the buckets. Psalm 1:3 says the same thing Jeremiah says, that the man is like a tree planted by rivers of water whose leaf does not wither, and planted is the operative word and somebody else did the planting; the Holy Spirit who inspired both passages did not put a man in charge of the water table.

Fruit is not output, and the grove is the place to see it. Output is what a man can point at: nine trips, four trees, a season got through. Fruit is what has been growing on the man over thirty summers of getting up at five, and Galatians 5:22 calls that kind of thing longsuffering and faithfulness, and the Spirit grew both of them without ever telling him He was doing it.