The Vine They Never Pruned

The vine over that table is older than the man who owns it and it goes right along the wall and over the pergola and gives the best shade in the street.

It also has about four feet of thick gray wood in the middle of it that has not produced a leaf in years.

Nobody has ever cut it. You would not. It is the vine.

Now here is the other thing.

Every night, at the end of the meal, he prays. Has done since the eldest was small, which is twenty years now, and the eldest is married and comes on Sundays with children of her own.

It is the same prayer. Not word for word out of a book, but the same shape, the same phrases, the same order, and everybody in that courtyard could say it with him and one or two of the younger ones sometimes do, under their breath, to be funny.

He is not troubled about repetition. He would tell you that a family needs words it knows and that saying the same thing every night is not a fault, and he is right about that.

What has begun to bother him is different.

He has started to feel that what he is handing them is a form.

Not a lie. Not empty. Just a shape that goes over the table every night the way the vine goes over the pergola, and about four feet of it, somewhere in the middle, has not put out a leaf in a long while.

He has said nothing to anybody. It would sound like he was criticizing the one good habit his household has.

If something in your house has gone woody, come and sit under the leaves. Nobody is going to hand you a scheme.

The pruning is done by somebody else, and it is not punishment

There is a line from Jesus about vines that people find frightening until they read the second half of it properly.

Every branch of mine that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.John 15:2

Notice who is doing the cutting. The Father. Not the branch, and certainly not the branch inspecting itself.

And notice which branches get pruned. The fruitful ones. Pruning is not what happens to failures. It is what happens to things that are working and could work more, and every gardener in the world knows that the two operations look identical from the outside and are opposite in meaning.

That is the frame for what has been bothering you at the end of a meal.

You are being tended rather than assessed, and the tending happens to branches that are already bearing. John 15:2 puts the pruning in the Father's hands and aims it at fruit rather than at failure, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised in the same discourse as the one who leads into truth, which means what you have noticed under that vine is care rather than criticism.

Twenty years of the same words is not the problem

Now let me protect something, because a man in your position usually does one of two things and both are wrong.

The first is to throw the prayer out and start again with something fresh, which would take from his household the one set of words every person in it knows by heart, including the small ones. Do not do that. A family needs words it knows and you were right about that from the beginning.

The second is to go and get a system. A scheme, a plan, a book of somebody else's prayers. This site does not hand anybody one and I am not about to start.

Nothing about those twenty years was wasted, and nobody is calling them a form. The wood in the middle of that vine is not a failure of the vine. It is what happens to something that has been carrying weight for a very long time.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, both of them ongoing rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, which means twenty years is not a ceiling on what can come out of your mouth at that table.

Here is the whole of the offer and it is smaller than you fear. Not a new prayer. One slow reading, on your own, before the meal.

Because the reason the words have gone woody is almost never the words. It is that the man saying them has not been fed anything new to say them out of, and a man who reads one passage slowly in the afternoon says the same familiar prayer differently that evening without trying to.

You have not run out, and there is nothing here that has stopped working. Isaiah 55:11 says His word does not return empty but accomplishes what He purposes, and it is His Spirit who carries it in, which is why one slow passage can put a leaf on four feet of old wood.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The vine is not your achievement. It is where He planted you, and He is the one who does the pruning.