Nobody Alive Has Seen It

Keone has been putting trees back on that hillside for nineteen years and he is not going to see it.

He knows the number. A hundred and twenty years, near enough, before that slope looks the way it is supposed to look. He is sixty-one.

It started with his brother and a Saturday. Now there are usually six or seven of them, and two of those are teenagers who come because their mothers make them and one of whom, Keone has noticed, has started coming on his own.

The work itself is not romantic. It is guards, and watering in the second summer, and going back to find that eleven per cent have gone anyway and replacing them, and doing it again the next year, and a spreadsheet.

And every single year there is a temptation and it arrives at the same point in the calendar.

There is always something that could be done instead. A viewing area. A path with a sign on it. A stretch of fence that would look finished by Christmas and that people would stand at and photograph.

He has said no every year for nineteen years and it has never once got easier, because the honest truth is that a man wants to stand back and see something, and he is not going to.

A young man asked him in the spring what it would look like.

And Keone said, "I do not know."

The lad thought he was being modest. He was not. Nobody alive has seen a mature stand on that slope. There are drawings and there are other places you can go and look at, and none of them are this hillside with this wind coming off this water.

He does not know. That is the accurate answer and he gave it.

There are three big trees at the top of that hill.

They were there when he was a boy. He has stood under them his whole life and so did his mother, and they are the only reason anybody knows what the slope is capable of.

His cousin found a photograph this year, in a box, from before the war.

They are in it. Small. In guards.

Somebody planted those three, by hand, and nobody in the family knows who, and there is no name on the back of the photograph.

Keone has stood under another person's unfinished work every day of his life and only found out this year that it was unfinished work at all. He had always assumed they were simply there, the way a hill is there.

Now let me ask you what you are standing under.

Because if this is yours, you are working on something with a horizon past your own, and you have been fighting the same temptation every year, and there is something in your life right now that somebody else planted and never saw.

The letter to people who would not see it

God sends a letter to exiles in Babylon and it is one of the most practical things in the Bible, and the timeframe is the part that matters.

Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.Jeremiah 29:5 to 7

Now hold that against the number a few verses earlier: seventy years.

Seventy. Which means most of the adults reading that letter were going to die there. Not a delay they would sit out. The whole of the rest of their lives.

And what does God tell them to do with it?

Plant gardens and eat their produce. Not: keep your bags packed. Not: hold on, this is temporary. Plant something and eat what comes off it, in a city that is not yours, in a stretch you are not going to see the end of.

And then the part that goes further: take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. He is telling them to plan for grandchildren in Babylon. He is telling a generation to build a life whose payoff belongs to people not yet born.

The famous verse about plans and a future comes two verses later, and it is spoken to exactly this: to a people, about a seventy-year horizon, most of whom would be buried there. It was never a promise that a person would personally see the end of the thing.

So hear this said over you, standing on a hillside with a spreadsheet and eleven per cent to replace. What you are building is not diminished by your not seeing it, and God told a whole generation to plant gardens in a place they would die in and called it obedience. That is written in a letter He sent on purpose to people with a horizon past their own, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a believer to will and to do, and He is not working to your timetable or to the length of your life.

Now let me be careful, because there is a way of saying this that would make you feel worse.

I am not telling you the wanting is a fault.

A man wants to stand back and see something. That is not vanity, and it is not weakness, and God made people who make things and there is a reason the first chapter of the Bible has Him looking at what He has done and saying it is good.

Wanting to see it is not the problem, and if you wait until you do not want that any more you will wait forever.

And I am not telling you the visible things are wrong. Somebody should build the path. The viewing area is not a betrayal, and if you put one in next year that would be fine, and this article is not asking you to be austere about it.

Here is the only thing I am saying.

You have been treating the not-seeing as a deficiency in the work.

It is not. It is a property of the work, and it is the same property that makes it worth doing. Anything that can be finished inside one life is, by definition, a smaller thing than a hillside, and you chose the hillside on purpose, nineteen years ago, with your brother, on a Saturday.

And you have had the answer standing over you the whole time.

Somebody put those three in by hand and there is no name on the photograph and you have stood under them since you were a boy. They did not see it. You did. That is not a tragedy in their story, it is the mechanism, and you have been the beneficiary of it your entire life without once noticing you were in somebody's future.

The word says one plants and another waters, and God causes the growth, and Paul wrote that to settle an argument about who gets credited. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which puts nineteen years of guards and watering on His side of the page.