Stopped thinking about going

"I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing." — John 15:5

I have been sitting with the word abide for three days.

It is an old word and a church word and it is one of those words that has been said so many times in so many sermons that it has gone smooth, the way a stone in the creek goes smooth — you can hold it up and it is beautiful and it tells you nothing about how it got that way.

Abide. Stay. Remain. Dwell. Not one of those words is the same as the others.

Stay is what you say to Biscuit. Remain is what the principal says to the fourth graders in the cafeteria. Dwell is what the Psalms say and it has a house in it — it has a room and a roof and a light left on.

But abide. Abide is longer than stay and quieter than dwell and it has a patience to it that the others do not. A person who stays might be restless. A person who abides is not going anywhere and has stopped thinking about going.

The garden is helping me this week, which the garden does sometimes, because the garden knows things I do not.

The vine out back — the muscadine on the fence Earl put up the year we moved in — has been on that fence for fifty-two years. The fence has been replaced twice. The wire has been replaced three times. The vine has not been replaced at all. It abides. It does not produce every year. Some years the grapes are small and hard and I leave them for the birds. Some years they are heavy and dark and I make more jam than any one person needs and give half of it away. The vine does not appear to notice the difference. It puts out what it puts out and stays.

I think Jesus picked the vine on purpose. Not the oak, which is strong. Not the cedar, which is beautiful. Not the fig, which he had already used and would use again. The vine, which has no trunk to speak of, which cannot hold itself up, which lives by gripping something that is not itself and which will collapse the day the fence comes down.

That is the part of the metaphor I am not comfortable with and I suspect that is the part that is doing the work.

Apart from me you can do nothing. I have been a capable woman my whole life. I do not love that sentence. I do not love the way it lands on a Friday morning when I have things to do and a garden to put down and a kitchen to run and a class to prepare for Sunday.

But I have been sitting with it, and what I notice is that it does not say apart from me you can do less. It says nothing. That is a different word.

Lord, I am on the vine. I have stopped thinking about going.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.