Planting a Tree at This Age

He is putting in a fig.

It is a small thing, about the height of his waist, and it went into the corner by the wall where the sun comes round in the afternoon. It will be four years before there is anything worth calling fruit on it, and probably seven before it is really a tree.

Everybody asks him the same question. They ask it kindly. That is important, because they are not mocking him and they are not being cruel. They ask it with a sort of affectionate puzzlement, and the question is always some version of: at your age?

He laughs and says something and changes the subject.

Here is what he has never said to any of them. He has been asking himself the same question for about two years, and his own version of it is not kind at all.

His version is: what exactly do you think you are doing.

Because somewhere in the last while, without announcing it, he came to a conclusion about his own life. The conclusion was that the part where he was useful is behind him. Not in a bitter way. He would say it calmly, the way a man states a fact about the weather. There was a stretch, and it was good, and things happened in it, and then everything happened, and now there is whatever this is.

He has been living in whatever this is for a while now. It is not misery. It is worse than misery in one specific way: nothing in it is aimed at anything. He does the days. The days are fine. And underneath them is a settled understanding that the account has closed and the rest is simply time.

And then he went and bought a fig tree, which does not fit the understanding at all, and I want to tell you what I think that means.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Not a word. The thing that closed the account is between you and God, and this message runs perfectly well without it.

What I want is the tree.

The psalm puts the fruit in the wrong season on purpose

Psalm 92 has a verse in it that would be unremarkable except for where it puts the harvest.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

Still is the load bearing word. Not again. Not once more before the end. Still, which means the thing has not stopped and was never scheduled to.

And the psalm puts it in old age, which is the exact season in which everybody, including the person living in it, has quietly agreed that the productive part is done.

That is not an accident of translation. The psalm is making a point against an assumption that every culture that has ever existed has held, and it makes it in the same breath as a picture of a tree planted in the house of the Lord.

Here is the exchange, and I will hand it over the way I would hand over bread. You are still in the season Psalm 92 is talking about, and the verse puts fruit in the very stretch you have written off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man plant something with a seven year answer to it.

Now, the honest limits, because a message like this can be sold badly and I will not sell it to you.

Psalm 92:14 does not promise you scale. It does not promise you a platform, an audience, a role restored, or anything at all that looks like the stretch you keep comparing this to. If the fruit in your second half is four people and a garden and a great deal of quiet, that is not a reduced version of the verse. That is the verse.

And this is not a message telling you that a quiet life is a failure. A quiet second half can be the best thing a man ever does. The trouble is not quietness. The trouble is a man who has concluded that the account is closed, because a closed account does not plant anything, and you did.

Which brings me to what the tree actually is.

A man who believes the useful part is behind him does not put a sapling in the ground with a seven year horizon on it. That is not something a resigned man does. Something in you is still expecting, and it went out and bought a fig, and the rest of you has been asking it at your age ever since.

You have a future that is still bearing rather than a stretch of time to be got through, and Psalm 92:14 keeps the fruit going into the exact season you closed, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a better decade to work in you.