There Is Hope of a Tree

There is a diary in a drawer in Halvard's kitchen and the back page of it has forty one small marks on it.

He has kept it for six years. Not the diary; he uses a new diary every year and he copies the running total across each January, which is a thing he does in about four seconds and then does not think about for the rest of the day.

Nobody has ever seen the back page. His wife has seen the diary a thousand times. It is not hidden. It is simply a diary with a number in the back of it, and the number is the most important object in that house and nobody in the world knows it exists.

He started it for a good reason. He wanted to be honest with himself. He had noticed a tendency to round things down in his own mind and he thought a mark on a page would keep him from doing that, and he was right, it does.

Here is what he did not foresee.

A number is a shape. Once a thing has a number attached to it, the number starts doing work that the thing itself never did. Forty one is not the same experience as one thing happening forty one separate times over six years. Forty one arrives all at once, on a page, in one glance.

And a number invites comparison to another number. He has started, without meaning to, to have a sense of what would be acceptable. Nine, maybe. Nine over six years would be a man having a hard time. Forty one is a different category of person and he has quietly moved himself into it.

He has never once asked who set the acceptable number, or where it came from, or on whose authority a tally kept in a kitchen by one man became evidence in a case.

And this is where I stop writing about Halvard, because you have a number.

It might not be written down. Most are not. I am not going to ask what the number is, and I am not going to tell you it is smaller than you think, because I do not know and because that is not the problem.

Where the sprouting comes from

I want to give you a sentence from the middle of the hardest book in the Bible, written by a man who had lost everything and was arguing with God about it in public.

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.Job 14:7

Look at the picture, because it is very precisely chosen.

Not a tree that was pruned. Not a tree that had a bad year. A tree that was cut down. The whole thing, taken off at the base, so that what is left in the ground is a stump and nothing else, and anybody walking past would say that the tree is finished, and they would be saying something reasonable.

And Job says there is hope of it.

Now find the source of the hope in that sentence, because this is the whole thing. The hope is not in the stump's determination. A stump has no resolve. It is not trying. It has no plan and it has made no promises and it will not be making any.

The hope is in what is under it and what happens to it. Water comes. The root is alive. And the sprouting is something that happens to a stump, in the passive, without one act of will on its part.

So take that where you actually sit with the diary in the drawer. You are not required to generate the rising, and Job 14:7 puts the hope in the root and the water rather than in the stump's intentions, and the Holy Spirit is the water in that picture and He is not waiting for a better attempt.

And notice one more thing. Job says nothing about how many times. He is not offering a maximum. The verse describes what kind of thing a tree is, not how many cuttings down it is permitted, and the written word never once hands anybody a number to stay under. The Spirit of God is not counting, and He never has been.