For Sunday, May 3, 2015 – John 15:1-8
How readily we hear the admonition to “bear fruit.” Go, do, produce . . . be all you can be, and then some. Be productive or be cast aside. Growing up on an Iowa farm, attending a small school and a small church where everyone had work to do, gave me the grand experience of belonging by participating, leaning into the tasks at hand and knowing myself as needed. Yet I do not recall hearing much about the silent partner of “bear fruit.” I do not recall being instructed in the fine art of abiding.
“Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” Abide? What was that? We were urged to stay busy. If we couldn’t stay busy, we should at least look busy. We were not taught equally to abide, to stay connected to the inner source and to trust that connection for all the rest. I remember once getting caught, in the middle of the day, doing the unthinkable—sitting alone, reading a book. “Is all the work done?” my mom asked. Inwardly I screamed, “Of course all the work isn’t done! All the work will never be done!”
I wanted to be a productive person and to bear good fruit, and yet I also had an intuitive sense of my need simply to abide. It is taking me the rest of my life to learn that to bear fruit and to abide are not incompatible. They are not a frenzy of activity followed by a frenzy of overwhelmed rest. They are lighthearted children of the same parent. To abide is to relax into the Life that is beyond our life, the source of all. It means not straining always to be and do more, measuring and rating the outcomes. Instead, we allow. We breathe and wait. We trust the gardener to plant seeds, we know not when or how, the right seeds for our current soil’s condition.
Bearing fruit happens from this posture of abiding. When I learn to trust the process, I discover how easy life is, how I can ask for anything and receive what I need, how I can take up my life and then give it away again. So peaceful, the relaxed rhythms of grace.
