The Peach Tree: When the Natural Order is Naturally Broken
Jamison and I bought our first home together in 2012 on Dahlia Street here in Woodland WA. In the front yard there was a young peach tree, just barely taller than me, not even 6 feet. We were so excited when we realized what type of tree it was. We got to watch as the white blooms started to turn to tiny fuzzy baby peaches. What I wasn’t anticipating was one morning I woke up to see that the peaches had so significantly grown that the weight became too much for the small branches of the young tree, and three of the bigger branches and broken. I stood depressed and stared at the branches that held dozens of peaches now running vertical, laid down the trunk of the tree. There was no way to save the fruit which was large and heavy, but still green and unripe.
I was heartbroken! A simple google search and I quickly learned that peach trees require faithful pruning and attention to keep the branches short, so they won’t grow so many peaches and snap the branches.
The following years we figured out how to manage this lil’ tree so that it would produce, no joke, hundreds of peaches! It ended up being one of my favorite things about that house, even in the city on a small lot, the peach tree that ended up tall, healthy and gave us many years of the best peaches I’ve ever had!
This has always stuck with me, and I recently thought of it again. Fast forward a few years and where we live now, there's a rose bush that if left unattended will grow so tall that when it starts kicking out roses in the Spring, the plant doesn’t have enough energy to allow the buds to open almost at all. The rose bush will send out dozens of buds and most of them die without opening.
Seeing this rose bush the other day, brought back to my mind the peach tree at our old Dahlia house, and it struck me differently, thinking about things in their “natural order” that are naturally broken:
Genesis 3:17-19
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
Over the last 5 years I’ve been on this journey of trying to heal my body and get it to stop growing cells that are attacking itself. Myself. Maybe I’ve been tempted to think of myself as being the “unlucky” minority of young adults with cancer, but thankfully that thought was challenged. My body is part of this fallen world that we live in. When I was first diagnosed, I struggled through feeling like God gave me cancer. Thinking about the peach tree, and the rose bush and myself, we’re all planted in faulty soil. Sin entered the world through one man, and it’s only God’s common grace that He STOPS the natural order of decay from happening at times. I can’t pretend to know the thoughts of God, but I know through the pages of scripture that it is always good.
So if the natural order of things can lead to dysfunction, and pruning is the answer in those cases, what does that mean for my cancer journey? Pruning is, though painful, always to the benefit of the health of the plant. This means that I make sacrifices in my diet, my time, my youthfulness, in order to prune my body to a place of health. What struck me in thinking about this while looking at my rose bush is that this same principle exists in our spiritual life as well:
John 15:1-5
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
I am a part of a vine, and the vinedresser wants me to bear fruit. To accomplish this, he prunes and pares away that which is unfruitful to allow for that which pleases Him to grow. This is not my doing, nor is it random chance or natural selection. This is careful and intentional loving-care from the owner of the vineyard.
My temptation is always to avoid the hard and painful things. To put my head in the sand and wait for the hard thing to pass. These are the opportunities for growth that stretch us outside our comfort zones. Honest feedback from a friend or family member about how my actions affected them. I could reject that opportunity to grow and just keep on going my way but before I know it, I’m out of balance and that part of me that is unhealthy snaps suddenly.
As soon as I recognize that these are opportunities for me, laid out by the Tender of the Vine for me to be healthy and balanced, ready for the growth and fruit He has planned for me, it changes my perspective of those hard things. Whether it’s cancer or criticism, slander or sickness (to quote John Piper). These things are producing something that will endure.