The Sticks Along the North Fence

In the middle of the worst of it, Malcolm did one thing that was not a rescue.

He planted a shelter belt.

Two hundred whips along the north fence, hawthorn and rowan and hornbeam, each one about the thickness of a pencil, each one in a spiral guard on a bamboo cane. Three days of work in February with a spade and a bucket and a lad from the college who kept losing his gloves.

His father had said for forty years that somebody should. The wind comes off the top in March and takes the fine stuff off that field and lays it in the ditch, and every spring Malcolm had watched his own ground go past him in the air and said next year.

That February, with everything else in the world going wrong, he planted the fence line.

Two winters later he walks it with the sprayer and counts.

They are sticks. That is the only honest word. Two feet of dead looking twig inside a green plastic spiral, and the spirals have gone brittle at the top, and the canes lean. Eleven of them are gone altogether, snapped or pulled or just not there. A rowan halfway along has three leaves on it. Three. He counted.

Nothing is above the guard. Not one of them is above the guard.

You could stand at the gate of that field on a clear day and look along the whole north fence and see, in effect, a line of thin green tubes on sticks, exactly as it looked the day the lad drove off.

And Malcolm has come to a conclusion about it, and he has never said the conclusion out loud, because a man does not say a thing like that to his wife.

He wasted two winters.

Not the money, and not the days, because the days would have gone somewhere anyway. He means something worse and quieter than that. He means that the one hopeful thing he did in three bad years turned out to be nothing at all, and if that came to nothing, then he has some idea what to think about all the rest of it.

He does not walk that fence in the evenings any more. He goes the other way round, along the lane, and tells himself it is because of the mud.

Here is where Malcolm goes back to his field, because you know what you planted and what has refused to show.

It might not be trees. It might be a habit you started in the second bad year that has changed nothing you can measure. It might be a prayer you have prayed since the spring with the same wall in front of you. It might be the two years you have spent trying to become somebody different and cannot find one piece of evidence for it.

Nothing is above the guard. And you have started marking that down as an answer.

What a whip does in its first winters

I want to take the verdict out of your hand, and I want to be careful about how I do it, because you did not arrive at it lightly.

I have no standing to overrule a man about his own field. None. But 1 Corinthians 3 does, and Paul puts it there in one flat sentence with all the credit stripped out of it: I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. You are the planter in that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one telling you what the planter is responsible for, which is the planting, and not one inch of the growing.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.1 Corinthians 3:6 and 7

Read what that verse does to your accounting, because it does something quite drastic.

It takes the growth out of the column you have been adding up. Paul is not saying the planting did not matter; he planted, and he says so first. He is saying the planter is not the one who makes anything come up, and therefore the planter is not the one qualified to decide whether nothing has.

Now take the word Paul uses. Growth. Not fruit, not height, not what stands above the guard. Growth is the whole hidden business of it, and a hawthorn whip in its first two winters is doing the only work that matters to a hawthorn: it is going down. Roots first, and roots for as long as the thing takes, and a whip that puts up a fine top before its root is set is the one that comes over in the first real gale. You have a root system under you that nobody at the gate can see, and the Spirit of God is not embarrassed by the state of the top.

Jesus said the same thing about a man and his seed, and He said it as a shrug. Mark 4:27 has the farmer sleeping and rising, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows and he does not know how. He does not know how. That is in the text, and it is meant to be a relief and not an insult. The man in the parable is not lazy and he is not failing. He simply is not the mechanism.

So the question is not whether you have earned a leaf. The question is who does the growing, and Scripture answers it before you can get your objection in.

That is not my opinion of your fence line. That is what the Spirit has been pressing on you through 1 Corinthians 3 since you started walking the other way round to avoid looking at it. You were not the engine of any of it. You never were, not in the worst winter and not in this quiet one.

I will not give you a date. Nobody honest will. Scripture sets no timetable on a root and I am not going to invent one, because a promised season is a promise nobody authorized, and you have had enough of waiting for a specific thing on a specific day.

What is written is better than a date anyway. Colossians 2:7 says a believer is rooted and built up in Christ, in the perfect tense, as something already true and going on being true. The Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man standing at a gate counting dead ones. You are rooted now. Not rooted when the tops come, not rooted if the tops come. Now.