The Olive Tree in the Blue Pot

Somebody from the church brought the olive tree round in the first winter, when the caring was still new and people still brought things.

It came in a blue glazed pot, the good kind, heavy enough that it has never once blown over. Maggie put it on the back step where she could see it from the sink, and for a while she was pleased with it. Silver leaves. A little crooked at the top. The sort of tree that looks like it has an opinion.

That was two years ago. It is exactly the same size.

She knows this because she has checked. Not with a tape, nothing as deliberate as a tape. She checks the way a person checks their own face: sideways, at the sink, while doing something else. Same height as the window latch. Same eleven or twelve leaves on the low branch. Same crooked top.

And somewhere in the second winter the tree stopped being a tree and became a report.

Two years, it says, every time she fills the kettle. Two years and look at you.

Because that is the arithmetic she has been running since February, when the routine ended and the hours emptied out and there was suddenly enough quiet in the house to think in. Two years of the same corridor and the same pills at the same hour. Two years where the whole of her went into keeping one person comfortable through one more night.

And now nothing. Not sad exactly. Not unwell. Just nothing moving, and a growing suspicion underneath the nothing, which she has never said out loud to a single person: that the caring took everything she had, and there is not enough left in her to grow anything with.

Same height as the window latch. Same crooked top.

Count the verbs

Hosea 14 is where God talks about what He does to a people who have run out.

And the thing worth doing with those two verses is not admiring them. It is counting the verbs. I will be like the dew. I will heal. I will love freely. Every single verb with any power in it has God as its subject, and the people in the passage are not asked to contribute so much as a bucket. Hosea 14:5 hands the whole engine to Him. And the Holy Spirit is putting that in front of a woman at a sink who has been quietly working out whether she has enough left in the tank. You are not the source of your own growing. You never were, and being empty does not disqualify you from a single thing in that passage.

I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily; he will take root like the cedars of Lebanon. His shoots will spread out; his splendour will be like the olive tree.Hosea 14:5-6

Look at what God picks for a picture. Not rain. Dew.

Rain is an event. Rain has a sound, and you know when it happened, and the next morning there are puddles to prove it. Dew has none of that. Dew arrives at the hour nobody is watching, on the leaves of a plant that looks precisely the same in the photograph as it did the week before, and it never once announces itself.

That is the choice Hosea 14 makes, and the Spirit has been repeating it in your house for months while you filed it as a nice image. You have been watered on nights you would swear nothing happened. Not because you have been coping well. Because dew is the sort of thing that falls on a plant that is doing nothing at all.

Now the harder part, and I am going to say what this is not and then stop.

Those two years were not a lesson. They were not a curriculum, and nothing here is going to tell you what they were for, because Hosea does not tell that people what their exile was for either. The passage does not explain anything. It says: I will be the dew. And that refusal to explain is the kindest thing in the whole chapter, because an explanation would have handed them a reason to be grateful for what happened to them, and God does not ask that of anybody.