Thoughts On A Given Day

Over the past few weeks I have pruned several of our fruit trees, of which we have a variety. We have plum trees, pear trees, fig trees, an apple tree, and peach trees. Some of these are very young and are not quite bearing yet, but a few of them are well established, mature trees. In past years we have had mixed results with these trees. Sometimes the trees bear well, and sometimes they bear less. Every year the critters – squirrels, birds, and even bees – have fed well on our fruit, but sometimes we get to eat some ourselves. I don’t consider so much that we have an orchard. We don’t. We do, perhaps, have an aviary and (to coin a phrase and, quite possibly, create a word) a prolific squirreliary. I have never been in the habit of pruning the trees, but this year I committed myself to doing a better job of it. Some of the trees were getting so large and crowded with limbs and branches that there just wasn’t good airflow to all the fruit the trees were attempting to bear, and this led to a reduction in the quality of the fruit. For one of our plum trees it was really too late to do too much pruning, because it had already begun to put out blooms. This was a bit of a surprise considering that only the week before we had six inches of snow, and there was still snow piled in areas around our property as I worked on the trees. I pruned the limbs and branches that were not blooming on the blooming plum tree, with the assumption that those were portions of the tree it had designated for removal already. I suspect that tree will put out some beautiful flowers, and it will begin to grow some nice fruit, but there will probably be a heavy frost again that will kill them all before we have the chance to taste a single plum from that tree, because it is simply beginning to bloom, and therefore bear, too soon, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Tonight it is supposed to drop down to about 26°, and I do not have the capacity to stop it in spite of what it might do to the blooms.
This has been a problem before. Last year I studied You tube videos about the proper time and method for pruning fruit trees, and I spent considerable time pruning our oldest plum tree, a tree that has given us many a great plum in the past. The flowers on that tree were beautiful last spring, but as the young fruit began to come in, a heavy frost came and destroyed them all. It was disheartening, but again, I could not prevent it. I had done everything I could to help it do well, but we ate no fruit from that tree last year. It does get a bit discouraging when that happens. We have planted every one of these trees ourselves, and we have nurtured them over the years to the best of our abilities. Yes, we do recognize that the area where we have planted them is not the best. A good orchard is planted out in the open where it gets exposed to plenty of sun. Hopefully it also gets ample rain as well. Our fruit trees are planted on property that we have never been willing to totally clear. We like our hardwoods, and we like the shade and shelter they provide, but the shade they provide to us makes it hard on the fruit trees to bear as well as they might have otherwise, because that limits the amount of sun they receive. I also have neighbors who have planted large evergreen trees along our property line, as a sort of barrier, I suppose. This doesn’t help our fruit trees either. It inhibits the flow of air to the fruit once the trees beside the evergreens have begun to bear. Sometimes the fruit on the trees closest to the property line suffer from a lack of airflow because of this. That particular problem is one that I was trying to alleviate with my aggressive pruning a few weeks ago. Maybe it will help. I know, however, that how well those fruit trees bear is not entirely up to me.
We can plant. We can prune. We can help nature provide the necessary water and nutrients that the trees need, but we cannot make the trees bear well, because some of the necessary ingredients to a fruit tree that bears well are beyond our control. Perhaps they would do better in another place where the sun is more readily available, where droughts don’t come practically every summer, and where fake springs don’t fool the trees into thinking that winter is past and it is time to put out blooms. This is where the trees are planted, however, and it is where they shall remain. We will do our best to help them, and they will bear what fruit they bear.
This same principle is true as well regarding the fruit that we attempt to bear as Christians. We live our lives, and we try to be good witnesses for Christ with both our deeds and our words to those with whom we have interaction. None of us, however, are perfect, so we will always have our shortcomings, but we keep trying even if our shortcomings have caused us to not see the results we had hoped for. Sometimes, though, (by chance or intentionality) we do everything right, and we still do not see the results we had hoped for. We study. We pray. We love. We give. We witness to others what we know to be true, but we do not see the fruit of our labors. I believe it is important that we understand that we will not always see the results of our labors for the Lord. Someone later, who is following in our footsteps, and witnessing to this same person, may indeed see the results of our labors.
I think of it like building a brick wall – one brick at a time. We may place the first brick in that wall, but that doesn’t complete it. It only begins it. We may place many more bricks in that wall, but only one person gets to be the fortunate one who lays the last brick in place. Others get to see the finished product, but only one person placed that last brick that bore the fruit of completion. Our witness is like that. Day after day we may provide a faithful witness to someone with whom the Lord is working, but we may not be the one shares that last word of testimony or evidence of the Spirit that finally moves that individual to the point of accepting Christ. The person who provided that last word of testimony obviously receives a blessing that we had longed for, but the fact that we did not see the harvest did not make the seeds we planted any less valuable. It is he who sows, the Apostle Paul says, who will reap eternal life.

John 4:35-37
Easy-to-Read Version (ERV)
35 When you plant, you always say, ‘Four more months to wait before we gather the grain.’ But I tell you, open your eyes, and look at the fields. They are ready for harvesting now. 36 Even now, the people who harvest the crop are being paid. They are gathering crops for eternal life. So now the people who plant can be happy together with those who harvest. 37 It is true when we say, ‘One person plants, but another person harvests the crop.’
Mark 4:3-8
Easy-to-Read Version (ERV)
3 “A farmer went out to sow seed. 4 While he was scattering the seed, some of it fell by the road. The birds came and ate all that seed. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where there was not enough dirt. It grew quickly there because the soil was not deep. 6 But then the sun rose and the plants were burned. They died because they did not have deep roots. 7 Some other seed fell among thorny weeds. The weeds grew and stopped the good plants from growing. So they did not make grain. 8 But some of the seed fell on good ground. There it began to grow, and it made grain.”
2 Corinthians 9:10
Revised Standard Version (RSV)
10 He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness.
Galatians 6:8
World English Bible (WEB)
8 He who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.