The Fig Tree From the Office

The fig tree is taller than the man carrying it, and he has to come through the door sideways, and the whole open-plan floor turns round from the cake to watch him do it.

Twenty-two years, and this is the last afternoon. The cake is from the good bakery, and the manager has made a speech that was better than his speeches usually are. Then the tree came in, in a black plastic pot with a ribbon tied round the trunk, and a card taped to it, and the card is what undoes her, standing there in front of thirty people with a plate of cake she has not touched. It says, in eleven different hands, more or less the same thing. You were the one who noticed. You always saw when someone was struggling. You knew about my mother before I told anyone. You brought soup. Thank you for the soup.

She was that person. She knows it. For twenty-two years she has walked this floor and known who was quiet and why, and stayed late, and turned up at hospitals. It is the truest thing anyone has ever said about her, and it is on a card taped to a fig tree, and she is going to cry in front of finance.

And under the crying is a thing she does not say. She shares an apartment with her sister. Has done for eleven years, since the sister's marriage ended. And her sister, who is at home right now with the television on, has never once had the soup. Her sister gets the woman who comes through the door at half past six with nothing left. The one who noticed everybody on this floor did not notice, or noticed and could not lift a hand, when the person on the other side of the wall was quiet for two weeks in March. Whatever grew on her, and something did, everyone here says so, it all fell out here. It rolled to the far edge of the field. And the person nearest the trunk has been living on what was left.

She carries the fig tree home on the bus, sideways, with the ribbon getting caught in the doors, and the whole way she is thinking, not about the office. About the wall.

You know that wall. Yours may be a sister or a husband or a father in the back bedroom, or a roommate, or the neighbor on the landing you nod to and never feed, or a friend who rings on Sunday and gets the tired version. You are fruitful. People say so, and it is true. And it lands everywhere except on the nearest person, and you cannot work out how a thing that grows on you ends up furthest from where you actually live. I am not going to make the household into a duty. I want to show you where a tree drops its fruit.

Where the fruit falls

The first psalm gives a picture of a person who stays close to God, and it does not say they are busy, or effective, or well thought of at work. It says they are like a tree.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.Psalm 1:3

Planted. Not moving about looking for the best ground. Planted, by water, and yielding fruit in season, which is the only way fruit ever comes: not manufactured, not strained for, grown, on a thing that stays where it is put. Let me say the thing plainly, because your instinct is going to fight it. Fruit is not output. The card on your tree is a list of output, and it is real, and I am not going to take it from you. But it is not what the psalm is describing. The psalm describes what grows on a person who is planted near God, and that grows on the branch whether anyone at work is watching or not, and the branch does not decide where it falls.

And here is where it falls. Under the tree. Every gardener knows it: the fruit lands nearest the trunk. Some rolls. Some is carried off. But the ground closest to the roots is the ground that is fed first, without the tree deciding anything, simply because it is nearest. That is the picture. Whatever God grows on you is meant to land, first and by gravity, on the ground where God has planted you.

Now let me sit in the pit with you, because it is a real one. Being fruitful everywhere except at home is not a failure of love. You love the person behind that wall; that is why it hurts. It is more like a failure of geography: the fruit fell where you have been planted in your own head for twenty-two years, and the person you actually live with got what rolled. Nobody chose it. And I am not handing you a schedule, because a schedule would make the household a job, and the household is not a job. It is where you are planted.

Hear this in the present tense: you are planted where you live, and what grows on you is meant to fall there first, and it is not a duty, it is gravity. I am not making that up to comfort you. It is written in Psalm 1:3, a tree planted and yielding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who grows the fruit and the one who decides that a tree feeds what stands under it.

Go home to your own people

Mark tells of a man Jesus healed on the far side of the lake, and when it was done the man begged to come with Him. And Jesus said no. Go home to your friends, He said, to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you. Read the direction of that. The man wanted to pour out what had happened to him on the road, with Jesus, in front of crowds. Jesus sent him back through his own front door. Your own people first. Not because the crowds did not matter, but because that is where a man is planted, and that is where what has been done in him is meant to land first.

You have been sent home first, by the same Lord, and home is not the leftover after the road, it is the first ground. Mark 5:19 is where that stands, and the Spirit of God is the one who turned a man round on a shoreline and can turn a woman round on a bus.

Paul says the same thing to a whole church without the story. As we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those of the household. Everyone, and especially the nearest. He does not say only. He says especially, which is a word about order, about where the fruit lands first. And notice that Paul's household there is the household of faith, which is wider than a flat and includes the person who lives alone. If you live alone, your nearest circle is still a circle: the neighbor on the landing, the friend who rings on Sunday, the man at the desk beside yours who is quiet this week. You are planted somewhere. Somebody is standing nearest the trunk.

You are not without a household, whoever is or is not in your rooms, and the ground nearest you is real ground and it is fed first. Galatians 6:10 puts the word especially in the sentence, and His Spirit is the one who knows the name of the person nearest to you better than you do.

Abiding is the whole method

I promised you no program and I meant it. Here is the one concrete thing abiding looks like this week, and it is not a plan for growth. Once this week, before you go through your own front door, or before the phone call, or before you knock on the landing, stop for the length of one breath and say to Jesus, out loud, I am staying attached, You do the growing. Then go in. That is all. It is not a technique. It is a branch remembering where its sap comes from before it enters the room where its fruit is meant to fall.

Because that is the whole of it. Jesus said whoever abides in Him bears much fruit, and apart from Him you can do nothing, and He said it about the branch, not about the effort. The fig tree from the office was not fruitful because it tried hard. It was planted and watered and it stayed. You bear fruit by staying attached and not by straining, and the staying is something you are already doing. John 15 is where the vine is, and the Holy Spirit is the sap, and neither one is asking you to add a shift at home to the shifts you already work.

Now the honest part about your mouth, because a fig tree does not get moved to a windowsill by being thought about. Jesus put the moving of a mountain into a spoken sentence, and He set the faith needed to say it very small, no bigger than a fig seed, so that the weight rests on the One being trusted and not on how well you have been doing at home. Your mountain is a habit of geography, twenty-two years old, and it can be spoken to. You have the standing to speak to it, because you are in Christ and He is in you, and the authority to say where your fruit lands was given to you by the One who planted you. The word puts the tree by the water and its fruit in season, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what you say further than the bus ever did.