Fruit is Hidden

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” – Galatians 5:22

You don’t see many fruit trees where we come from on the East Coast, so when we moved here, we eagerly planted pomelo, apricot, guava, apple, lemon trees—only to realize that it sometimes takes years for trees to bear a significant crop (not to mention the thieving squirrels). So we planted them and did our best to not count on eating fruit anytime soon. 

There’s something similar about our lives now. Results used to be more immediate: the time from a swim heat, visual acuities measured after surgery, end-of-year shows at school. Now, we deal in relatively slow, invisible things, like how our kids relate with each other constantly at home, how we occupy our minds during spare hours with nowhere to go. I asked Dave the other day, “do you think this time will be an overall pro or con for us as a family?” and he said, “I don’t know. The losses are pretty obvious, but I think there may be even greater gains, just not in ways that we can see right now or maybe until much later.”

There there is something very spiritual about the pace of this time. It’s a pace that encourages us to let go of what we can immediately see and measure, and this is how the Holy Spirit works, hidden and slow like fruit coming to the tree. Inexorable, but not predictably quantifiable. We must let go of immediate results and accept the hiddenness of the fruit if we are to live as Jesus did, for that is often how God works.

Nouwen writes: “We belong to a generation that wants to see the results of our work. We want to be productive and see with our own eyes what we have made. But that is not the way of God’s Kingdom. Often our witness for God does not lead to tangible results. Jesus himself died as a failure on a cross. There was no success there to be proud of. Still, the fruitfulness of Jesus’ life is beyond any human measure. As faithful witnesses of Jesus, we have to trust that our lives too will be fruitful, even though we cannot see their fruit. The fruit of our lives may be visible only to those who live after us. What is important is how well we love. God will make our love fruitful, whether we see that fruitfulness or not.”