The Cutting in the Jam Jar

Two Christmases ago Steve's sister came round with a cutting in a jam jar.

She had snipped it off the vine that grows up the front of her house, the one their gran put in before either of them was born, and she stood it on his kitchen windowsill in about two inches of water and said, quite confidently, that it would take.

It has not taken.

That is not quite fair. It has not died either. It sits there in the same jar, the same greenish water that he tips out and refills when he remembers, a woody little stick the length of a pencil, and in two years and four months it has not put out one leaf. Not one. Not a bud, not a curl, nothing.

He works nights at a distribution depot. He gets in around half past six in the morning when the sky is doing something and the kettle is the loudest thing in the flat, and the jar is right there at eye level while he waits for it to boil.

He has nearly binned it twice. Once properly, at four in the morning on a bad shift, when he decided on the walk to the van that it was a stupid thing to keep looking at.

Because it is not really about the cutting, and Steve half knows that.

Nothing has visibly changed in his own life either. Same flat. Same shifts. Same three people he actually speaks to. He is not in any trouble. He is two years and four months steady and he has done nothing anybody would put in a newsletter, and when somebody at work said, you are doing really well, you know, he said, so far.

So far. He has said it a lot. It is a small word and it does a lot of work.

What he means by it is this. He thinks he has had a good run. He thinks the steadiness is weather rather than climate, and weather changes, and every morning that he wakes up still standing feels less like ground under him and more like a coin that has come up the same way an improbable number of times.

He does not think he is rooted. He thinks he has been lucky.

And then one night, without deciding to, he reached over to lift the cutting out and bin it, and it would not come.

He pulled harder. It still would not come. He turned the jar round in the light, and the whole inside of the glass was white. Roots had gone down and round and back through themselves, a wet white mat of them wound against the curve of the jar, and the thing was wedged in there so completely that he would have had to break the glass to get it out.

Two years of nothing on top. Two years of that underneath.

He put the jar back on the sill and stood in his kitchen in his coat for a while.

And here is where I stop talking about Steve.

You know what your jar is. You know what the last two years look like written down on one side of paper, and it is not much, and you have stopped saying it out loud because you can hear how it sounds.

Nothing has happened.

And somewhere in the last few months you started calling that luck.

What is holding what

Jesus gave His friends an image the night before everything, and He did not choose a runner, or a soldier, or a man building something.

He chose a branch.

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.John 15:5

The word underneath "remains" is a word about location, not about effort. It means to stay put, to lodge, to be where you are when nobody is watching. It is the least impressive verb in the New Testament and it is the one He picked. You are remaining. The Spirit is the sap moving in that sentence, and sap is not something a branch manufactures for itself.

Somebody, somewhere, at some point, gave you the impression that if it were real in you it would be showing by now. John 15:5 says the reverse of that in six words: apart from me you can do nothing. You have done two solid years of what looks to you like nothing, and the Spirit is not calling it stalling. The word for a branch that stays on the vine through a season with no leaves is not stalled. It is attached.

Here is what actually happened in that kitchen, though, and it is worth being exact about it. Steve did not discover that he had grown. He discovered that he could not be lifted out. Those are different findings, and only one of them is a measurement.

I cannot prove to you that your steadiness is not luck. Psalm 92:13 can, and it does it in one word: planted in the house of the Lord. Planted is a passive verb with a pair of hands behind it. You were planted. Somebody knelt down and did that, and the Spirit is not in the habit of gambling with people.

And Colossians 2:7 puts it the same way round, rooted and built up in Him, with the rooting done to you rather than by you. You have not been holding on for two years by grip strength. You have been held, and His Spirit did the holding through every four in the morning you cannot even remember now.

That is not my opinion of your two years. That is what the Spirit has been pressing into you through 1 Corinthians 3:7, where Paul says neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, only God who gives the growth. If the growth is His to give, then the absence of visible growth is His business and not your failure, and nothing in that verse hands you a schedule.

I am not going to tell you a leaf is coming. I do not know that, and Scripture does not hand me a date to give you. What I can tell you, because it is written and because His Spirit is saying it now, is that the thing in the jar cannot be pulled out any more.