But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)
The Spirit Does the Growing
The long table in the yard is two tables pushed end to end, leveled with a folded napkin under the short leg. By noon the shade has come off it and the cloth is too hot to lean on. The woman who set it out is still moving chairs. She counts the places twice, carries one setting down to the far end, and then carries it back, because her brother and the man her sister married are both coming, and she hasn’t worked out yet which of them should be nearer the shade.
The Spirit grows love in people. Joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control come up out of the same source, and Paul calls all of it fruit. He names the other kind too, what people turn out on their own when nothing restrains them, and that list runs longer, and he leaves it open with “and the like” because it doesn’t finish. Against such things there is no law. There’s no law anywhere aimed at one item on that list.
She’ll use most of that list at her own table before the plates go around twice. Forbearance goes first, somewhere in the second hour. Self-control shows up when the conversation goes where that conversation always goes, and she’ll move a chair down herself for the man who comes late and would rather nobody looked up.
She can’t decide by lunch to have any of it, and neither can you. The Spirit grows it, and growing runs on the schedule of a living thing, not on yours, and you’ll have very little to show for it in between.
She puts them at the same end in the end, across from each other, because that is what there’s room for, and then she stays on her feet through the meal where she can see it. By the time the shade is back over the far end the two of them are laughing at something she can’t hear from where she’s standing. Her own plate is on the counter behind her with the fork still lying across it.
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve tried to manufacture two or three of those nine by Friday, and what I got was a decent imitation that didn’t survive a long afternoon. You grow them. Do that in me at whatever speed living things go. I’d rather have the slow one.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
