The One Thing Asked of You

I told you at the beginning that your part in all this is something small and something hard, and that it is not climbing. Now, at the end, I will tell you plainly what it is.

Stay close. Let the love flow. That is all.

The whole of it comes down to one picture Jesus gave His friends on the last night, and I will give it to you the way He gave it to them.

"I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in Me — and I in him — bears much fruit, because apart from Me you can accomplish nothing." — John 15:5 (NET)

A branch does not strain to make grapes. It does not study fruitfulness or climb toward it or work itself into exhaustion trying to produce. It does one thing: it stays on the vine. It remains. And the life of the vine flows up through it, and the fruit comes — not by the branch's effort, but by the branch's connection. Pull the branch off the vine and lay it on the ground and tell it to try harder, and it will produce nothing but dead wood. Leave it on the vine, and it cannot help but bear.

You are the branch. The love of God is the life flowing up from the vine. The fruit — the mercy, the justice, the kindness, the forgiveness, all of it — is the love of God made visible in the world through you. And your one task, the only thing finally asked of you, is to remain. To stay connected. To keep returning to Him when you have drifted. To not, in the end, let go.

You will fail at the loving, often. The branch does not have to be a perfect branch. It only has to stay on the vine. When you have been short and cold and selfish — and you will be — the answer is not to strive harder. It is to come back. To remain. To put yourself again where the love can flow into you and out through you. The Christian life is not a climb you might fall off of. It is a connection you keep returning to. Not the absence of failure — Peter failed badly and became the rock. Not the absence of doubt — Thomas doubted and was met. The walk of a child of light is simply this: the refusal to permanently let go. The branch that bends in the storm but does not break away from the vine.

So here is the whole of it, said the way I would say it to you if we were sitting at one table with the evening coming on.

There was a council, and it failed, and the thrones stand empty. And God, who is love, looked at His emptied council and His starving world and did not make new spirits to fix it. He bent down into the dust and made you, and breathed His life into you, and poured His own love into your heart by His Spirit — the very love that runs between the Father and the Son — so that the love the great ones would not carry could finally pour through a child of clay into a world dying for it. He asks you to do nothing grand. He asks you to stay close to Him and let it flow. And when you do — when you forgive at the kitchen table, when you sit in the grief, when you tell the costly truth, when you kneel with the towel — you are not merely being kind. You are filling the empty thrones. You are doing the council's abandoned work. You are becoming, one ordinary day at a time, the thing the whole creation is craning its neck to see.

And one day He will finish what He has begun. The flicker will become the fire. The branch heavy with fruit will be revealed for what it always was. And the children of dust, full at last of the love of God, will sit with the Son on His throne and help Him govern a healed world in the love that poured through them to get there.

There is a word for what abiding in the vine gives you, and it is the most important word in the book. Jesus spoke it the night He gave His friends the vine image, and it is the sentence that holds up everything — the walk now, the shining body then, the throne at the end:

"Now this is eternal life — that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

Eternal life is not what begins after death. It is the knowing that begins right now, at the vine, in poverty of spirit, in the small daily walk. The glorified body does not receive a different kind of life from the life already given at the vine. It receives the same knowing, made permanent and visible — the same knowing the branch already has, finally unhindered. The shining body is the abiding disciple with the veil lifted. The tree and the fruit are continuous. What you receive now when you remain in Him is what the resurrection will make complete.

So do not imagine that the throne and the shining body and the filled council seats are somewhere far off, a different story from the one you are living today. They are this story, grown to its fullness. The kitchen is the training ground for the throne. The forgiveness at the table is the governance the council refused. The branch that stays on the vine becomes, in the end, the child of light in aevum who shines because the vine's life has finally filled every part of what they are.

That is what you are. That is what you are for. Now, and at the end of all things.

And we are only just beginning. That is not a discouragement. It is the gentlest thing I know to tell you. You do not have to have arrived. You do not have to love perfectly yet, or understand all of it, or be anything other than a first-day student with your hands open and your heart turned toward the Teacher. There was a word spoken to me once, at a moment I did not expect it, in the middle of ordinary work — you are finally starting to get it. Not you have arrived. Not now you understand. You are starting. That is a word for a person still on the road, and it is the truest word I can leave you with, because it is as much for you as it was for me. We are starting to get it. That is all any of us are doing. And it is enough — more than enough — because the One teaching us is not in a hurry, and He is not going to stop.

Stay close. Let it flow. We have only just begun, and that is exactly where He wants us.