What You Need to Bloom for More Than a Day

It started out as a science experiment. 

A way to watch how plants respond to changes in temperature. 

So in the middle of the snowy February cold we cut thin, lithe branches of a bush, and kept them snug in our little house.  And soon, they began to bud.  And each day we watched the buds appear as we sat around the kitchen table at mealtime, watching, waiting, marveling at the unfurling.  Weeks went by, budding and then the delicate yellow blossoms came out.  We all enjoyed their beauty in the cold of winter. 

Until.  Until the end of March when one day one of the kids noticed that the blossoms were wilting, shriveling, ugly.  Then they fell off, all the way off.  Next the leaves began to wilt, and hang limp and lifeless.  

“Mom, look at our branches!  Why is that happening?  Why is it dying?  I thought it was blooming for spring?  Why didn’t it stay alive?”

“Because it is not connected to the vine.  That is just a branch.  It can’t live forever on its own.  It has to be connected to the vine, it has to have roots to get food to live, otherwise it might bloom for a while but then it dies quickly,” I say.

I’ve known too many people with the same problem. 

People who came into the warmth of the Church from the cold world, and they started to bud.  Their buds sprouted leaves and their blossoms were beautiful.  It was easy to think they part of the Vine, that they were grafted in.  But after a time, the blossoms shriveled, never bearing fruit.  Because fruit can only be born as life flows from the roots into the branch. Fruit is excess life.  Life you can only get from being connected to the Vine.  This was one of Jesus’s favorite illustrations to describe what it means to be a believer in Him, He used plants several times to explain what the Kingdom of God is like.

Jesus said this, “I am the Vine, you are the branches.  If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.  If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.  If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you.  This is to my Father’s glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” John 15:5-8.

I need His life flowing through these veins to ever produce real fruit.  I can look pretty for a while, but in the end; death.  But for those of us branches that have been grafted into the Vine, we get to suck that Living sap forever and this blooming never ends.  In fact, the Word says we never cease to bear fruit, even in the driest of seasons because our roots go deep.

Deep into the soil of His life. And His life, it flows boundless, ever and forever producing fruit that brings the Father glory. 

We are the branches of that wild olive plant, the one that didn’t deserve to be included, but he took us, He grafted us into His vine by grace, and made us Family.  He offers this grafting, this including, to all, even the wildest of us  shoots, and all we have to do is surrender to the pruning, be tied into the Vine through belief and then just receive The Life.  Because vines don’t struggle and strive to produce fruit, it just pops as the excess Life flows through the veins.

I know what it means to be a wild shoot.  I know how much I don’t deserve this wilder grace.  And yet He gives it for all who would believe, who would turn from the death of sin and surrender to Holy Life flowing. 

“So Mom, can we plant some real plants, this spring, ones that will keep blooming?”

Yes.  And in Christ our blooming never ends.