Iron & Altar

"Leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it." - Luke 13:8

Three years, no fruit. The owner wants the fig tree cut down; it's using ground that could grow something else. The gardener asks for one more year. He'll dig around it and add fertilizer. If it still bears nothing after that, fine, cut it down. But not yet.

For a stretch of years, I was that tree. I was working and starting my career, and I'd fallen away from the practice of the faith entirely. I wasn't hostile to it. I just wasn't producing anything, and I'd stopped pretending I would soon. A good friend kept inviting me back to Mass anyway. Not once. Over and over, long past the point where a reasonable man would have taken the hint and stopped asking.

A steward sometimes has to be the gardener for a tree that isn't his own.

He never made it a project. He just kept asking, the way you'd ask a friend if he wanted to grab lunch. Eventually I said yes to Mass the way I'd have said yes to lunch, almost by accident, and that was the beginning of the ground actually getting worked. I don't know exactly what changed in him to make him patient enough to keep at it. I know what it did in me.

If you're the gardener for anyone right now, brother, someone who looks like bare ground to everybody else, this reading is your patron. Ask for the year. Then use it.

Name one person you've quietly written off as unlikely to change. Ask God for one more year for that person, specifically, out loud. Then reach out to them once this week, the way my friend used to reach out to me, without making it a project.

Lord, someone dug around my roots long after it made sense to. Let me be that patient for someone else, even when a year looks like nothing. Amen.