Eighteen Months and Not One Lemon

She bought the lemon tree on the Tuesday of the week she stopped going.

That was not a plan. She was in a garden center buying compost for her mother and she went past a bench of small citrus in black plastic pots, and one of them had four glossy leaves and a price tag hanging off a branch, and she picked it up and carried it to the till without deciding to.

Fola wanted one living thing in her house that nobody else had an opinion about.

She has looked after it properly. It stands by the back door where it gets the morning. She waters it on Wednesdays. She bought the special feed. She turned it round through the winter so it would not lean.

Eighteen months. Leaves, yes. Twice a flower, which fell off. Not one lemon.

In April she carried the pot down the side of the house and stood with it by the bins for about a minute and a half, and then carried it back and put it exactly where it had been.

And this is the part she has not said to anybody, because saying it makes it sound like something a doctor should hear.

Somewhere in the last few months she stopped thinking about the tree as a tree.

Because the same arithmetic runs on her. Eighteen months out of that building. Eighteen months of nobody raising their voice at her, nobody watching what she wore, nobody asking her in a particular tone of voice how her walk was. Eighteen months of being, by every measure anyone could name, safe.

And she is the same.

Same flinch when a certain kind of email arrives. Same knot at the bottom of the stairs. She does not pray more than she did. She has not become one of those wide open people who laugh easily and mean it. Nothing has happened in her. No breakthrough. No new thing. Eighteen months of leaves and not one lemon.

So a thought has started arriving, and it arrives in her own voice, which is what makes it convincing.

If the room was the problem, something would have changed by now. Nothing has changed. So it was never the room.

She has never once said that out loud. She thinks it standing at the sink on Wednesdays with a watering can in her hand.

Who told you a flat line was a verdict

Ask that question honestly and follow the answer, because it matters where a sentence like that came from.

Nobody said it to your face. Nobody put it in an email. It arrived on its own, out of the quiet, wearing your own voice, and it has been sitting at the kitchen table for months with no evidence at all and a great deal of confidence.

Now here is what Jesus told a room full of people about a tree exactly like yours.

But the one tending the vineyard answered and said to him, "Sir, leave it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put manure on it."Luke 13:8

Read who is talking. There is a conversation going on over that tree, and the tree is not in it.

A verdict had been spoken. Three years, no fruit, cut it down. And then a second voice in the same garden asked for the tree, offered to dig around it, offered to work the ground at its feet, and asked for it to be left where it stood. The tree did not plead, or improve, or produce a single fig to strengthen its case. It simply stood in the dirt while somebody who loved it did the talking.

That is the whole scene, and you are in it. You have somebody speaking for you in a conversation you have never once been able to hear, because Scripture says plainly that Christ lives to make intercession for those who come to God through Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that same intercession for you when you have no idea what to pray. Hebrews 7:25 is not poetry. It is a job description.

A root does not file a report

Look at what the gardener actually asks to do. Not prune. Not fruit. Dig around it, and put manure on it.

Both of those happen below the line of sight, in the dark, in the dirt, and neither of them produces one thing you can photograph. If you stood in that vineyard the day after the gardener finished, the tree would look exactly the same as it looked the day before, and the ground would look worse.

So hold that against your eighteen months.

You were never given the instruments to read your own root. That is not a flaw in you, it is the design: the Spirit searches the deep things of God and the deep places in a person, and Scripture puts that work in His hands rather than in your feelings on a Wednesday afternoon. What is going on under your soil does not send you a monthly summary, and its silence is not a report.

I want to be careful here, and I would rather be honest than comforting.

I am not going to tell you what next spring holds on that windowsill or in your chest. Nobody honest can tell you that, and anybody who puts a date on it has left the ground of what is written. Luke 13 does not hand out a schedule and neither will I.

What I will say is the thing the passage actually settles. Somebody asked for you. The digging is being done. And the reason the pot is still by your back door is not that anybody forgot to carry it to the bins.