Too Late for Planting

She was sixty-eight, which she will tell you before she tells you anything else, and she says it the way a person says the mileage on a car they are apologizing for.

Nell came to Christ two years ago on a Thursday afternoon in a hospital corridor while waiting for news about somebody else, which she also finds embarrassing, because she thinks a person ought to come in through the front door of a church rather than sideways in a corridor at sixty-eight.

She is seventy now. She reads in the morning. She has been twice to a group and liked it and did not go back, and if you asked her why she would say something about her knees.

And the thing she believes, which nobody has ever heard her say because she has never said it, is that she got in but she got in too late for anything to come of it. She is grateful. She would not have you think she is not grateful. But in her mind there is a sort of ledger where the useful years are, and she arrived after they closed, and what is left is a decent quiet run to the end, and she is not going to be one of these old women who pretends otherwise.

She was a gardener all her life. That is why the picture in her head is the one it is. Everybody in that village knows that you do not put anything in after a certain week; you can, and it will come up, and it will not amount to anything before the light goes. There is a right time and there is a too-late, and she has read her own life off that calendar without once asking whether the calendar applies.

If you came late, hear the question. Which verse gave the season an end date?

The psalm goes out of its way to say old age

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

Somebody could have written that psalm without the second half of that line. It would have been a perfectly good psalm about the righteous flourishing like a palm tree, and nobody would have missed anything.

Instead it says in old age, specifically, deliberately, as though anticipating exactly the objection Nell has been making silently for two years.

And it does not say they shall be maintained. It does not say they shall be comfortable, or shall finish well, which is the phrase people use about the old and which means, if you listen to it, that nothing further is expected. It says bring forth fruit, which is a producing word, and fat and flourishing, which is not a description of somebody being carefully looked after in a chair.

You are named in a verse that went out of its way to include your age, and it is already written that way, and it says fruit rather than maintenance. I am not being encouraging to a woman about her knees. It is written in Psalm 92:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the phrase in old age into a psalm so that a gardener at seventy would find it there.

The calendar and the covenant

And here is the specific untangling for a woman who has grown things her whole life.

She is right about the calendar. She is absolutely right about it, and nobody in that village would argue with her, and I am not going to. There is a week after which you do not sow, and the light goes, and that is how growing seasons work and she has known it since she was six.

But she has applied a rule about light and frost to a covenant that is not governed by either.

The psalm does not say the old are exempt from the calendar. It says that the ones planted in the house of the LORD flourish there, and the reason given, three verses on, is to shew that the LORD is upright. The flourishing is a demonstration about God, not a report on the length of anybody's remaining season.

You are planted in a house where the growing is not governed by the light outside, and it is already the LORD's demonstration and not your calendar. Scripture says those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God (Psalm 92:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a rule about frost from a promise about a house.

The two years she is not counting

And now the small thing I would say at the gate, because she does not count evidence, she deflects it.

She reads in the morning. Every morning, for two years, without anybody checking on her, without a group, without a habit tracker, without anybody to be impressed. She has never once described that as growth. If you put it to her she would say it is just something she does now.

That is exactly what fruit looks like from inside. It never announces itself. It is just something you do now that you did not do before.

You are already doing something you were not doing two years ago, and it is already the thing you have been waiting to see. It is written that they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been getting a woman up to read for two years without her ever counting it.