If Grace Grew on Trees
It had been sitting there on the window sill for days, one of the many little apples she picked with her own little hands from the orchard just a short drive north. So she surprised me when her eyes got wide and she announced “Look, Mama! That little apple has a leaf starting to grow out of it!”
I chuckled, and explained that the leaf was not sprouting out of the apple, but that the apple grew on the tree near that leaf, and when she picked the apple, she had picked the leaf too. She looked at me as if I were clearly delusional – had all together lost my marbles, and said, without missing a beat: “Mom, apples don’t grow on trees!”
We’ve done more apple picking this year than any other. We’ve read Apple Farmer Annie and she learned about apples at preschool and we’ve driven by the orchard dozens of times, seen branches weighed down by clusters of ripe red apples.
But I’m thinking today that (forgive me) the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Something she had seen and touched and experienced and tasted had zero impact on her understanding of it. An apple growing on a tree: absurd! And how often do I live unaltered by the grace I’ve received, apathetic to the power of God’s Word, ignorant of the rest offered in repentance? These costly treasures I’ve experienced are left forgotten – to be conjured up during quiet times and Sunday services and times of desperation, but dismissed in the everyday – where I need them most.
I forget that I’ve been given a new name, that I’ve been set free, and I live like a slave to fear again- defaulting to pride and coasting into gossip and people-pleasing, hurting those around me and living ignorant of grace, until I’m dead in my tracks again, all of a sudden desperately aware of my need for it – reminded that there’s nothing I can do on my own, nothing I can even begin to change on my own – that it’s by grace alone that I can stand before Him, that I can be made new, that relationships can be restored.
And the grace that poured down from a tree centuries ago bears fruit in my heart as I give up my striving and quiet my soul and receive undeserved. I’m humbled that He loves me because He is love, regardless of my successes and failures. And I pray that this love would transform my being and thinking and doing into something beautiful in His eyes.