tend me
“Would you like an elephant plant?” She asks, holding up a tiny plant in a square pot–terra cotta orange, but plastic—a baby that moments later I cannot find.
I’m not sure it’s actually called an elephant plant, but it might be. She’s not the best for remembering the names of things, and she lifts this baby thing, with it’s tangle of flat, long-slender leaves like sunstriped, windswept beach hair, from somewhere behind a couple of larger pots of Elephant’s Ears I know she’s grown from a larger plant, some broad-leafed, thriving life now indistinguishable as the mother. This plant looks more like me, after just a few hours in the salty wind.
She asks, and it’s one of the first things she says to me in the new of the day, just as I sit in the ocean breeze, listening to wind chimes and watching the birds; while I sit staring at the sky and its soft morning light, the streaks of pink and coral. I get up early just to breathe in the quiet and sip coffee and tell God how much I want to just walk right to Him, maybe along those shades of otherworldly streets, maybe right out on top of the waves. I tell Him and the salt air rushes, and the Spirit whispers, “Come,” just as He did when Peter asked (Matthew 14:28,29); just as He always does when we so desperately want to be at His side. The wind blows my hair away from my cheeks, a breath strong enough maybe to hold me, to fill me too, and I close my eyes. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit (John 3:8). I love this salty wind, the first element that greets me the closer I come to the ocean, because it reminds me that I am free and I can go to Him from any space and at any time because my eternal birth—my resurrected life—is of the Spirit. The only thing that keeps me away from Him is the distraction I allow. So I loose my hair and let the wind sweep through it, dry and warm and gentle, coming and going from unseen places, leaving only the evidence of it’s path.
My mom walks out on the porch and tastes the morning air and lifts the baby plant up so I can see its tangled leaves like a knot, like the tangle of my thoughts, and she says, “Would you like an elephant plant?” She still wears her pajamas, soft and faded. Her white hair slips out from the knot on the back of her head, framing her Native American skin, her high cheek bones, her deep brown eyes, and I give thanks just to see her standing there in the morning light. I wonder if she knows that just seeing her is a gift to me, as filling as the breeze.
I smile and nod, scanning the lines of life she’s made, the green stems and bright leaves framing the edges of the porch. She likes plants that easily multiply. I count four Christmas Cactuses, four Elephant’s Ears, maybe five of these she calls elephant plants, all sprouting randomly in plastic pots, an art form unique to her. It’s funny how we live so much of life seeing each other only in the context of self. I know who you are in relation to me, but do I really know who you are, how God has rooted you specifically, the unique impression of His fingers in the shape of you, breathing apart from me? I have asked Him to help me see in the context of Him. And it’s only lately that I’ve come to see my mother as a sower.
“When these sprout new leaves, if you’ll just plant the sprouts, they’ll grow into a whole new plant,” she says, setting down the baby. She picks up a few others that have matured a bit more, showing me, telling me about when and how she rooted them. She doesn’t always see the beautiful ways she expresses herself, the clear art of her in something so easy and quiet like rooting these sprouts and tending them unintrusively. I watch her pause briefly by these plants, so quickly it barely seems to be an intention, testing the soil with her fingers. She gestures sometimes as we pass by, following my glance, saying something lightly, and that’s the only way I know that she tends her planting. And yet, the evidence of her attention is clear.
The mother cactus, from which my mother has birthed uncountable gifts (a plant for each of her sisters, a plant for me, knotty winter-blooming hope for friend after friend, once even a new sprout for every one of my children’s teachers past and present), languishes, sprawling and elegant in a pot now too heavy to lift. “That’s the mother,” Mom sometimes says, when I stand looking at the generous wealth of the original plant, the red-tipped edges of this beautiful lady still promising new growth. And then my mother reminds me that this plant was itself a gift, a planting made by a friend when her own cactus sprouted. “It’s easy to do,” Mom says. “You just pull off a new sprout and put it in the soil.” But I know that this multiplying of Life is more than the just, more than the initial planting. I know it’s also her fingers pushed into the soil, the time she stops unseen to water, the way she watches the light. I know Mom comes along and moves the plants out of harm’s way when the painters come or when children run free across the plank floors. I never see her do these things, but the evidence of her presence, her life-giving, her tending, is counted in the multiplying of growth, the countless gifts shared, the new borne.
And so it is with one who is born of the Spirit.
His Spirit is like the wind, moving unseen, tending. He plants the shoots of us deep, rooting us all new, the redeemed children of a generous King. He makes gifts of our lives, of our equipping, plunging His fingers into the heart of us, testing our need and offering us Himself as light, as water, as blood, as nourishment. We do not know where He has come from or where He goes, but the evidence of His tending is clear in the multiplying of growth. He knows when and how He rooted us, and the longer He tends us the more intimately He traces the history of our living, the sprawling of our influence, the new life that He has carefully sprouted from our following. And the longer we live in Him, the more we look like the King who gave us life, the Spirit who tends, the Father who protects and provides for us.
“Anyway,” she says, smiling, noticing my computer in front of me, shifting her gaze back toward the kitchen and breakfast, “you can have one of these, if you want it.”
And of course, I will not go home with out my elephant plant, because it reminds me of her and beach hair and the salty wind; because it reminds me of the Spirit. I only hope the long, beautiful leaves will grow as well in my hands, in the shelter I offer them. I know that these plants live and grow and multiply well because they live here, in the ocean breezes, under her notice, with her fingers touching them. And so also, I live and grow and multiply well, I become a gift, a mother from which new lives are born, only because I breathe Him as air. I am spiritually alive only because He has made it possible for me to dwell in Him, only because when I tell Him that I choose to be by His side, that I want Him so desperately, His blood-bought answer eternally will be, “Come.”
*~*~*
I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing (John 15: 1-5).
