The Lilac In The Bucket

Junie Vance kept a lilac start in a five gallon bucket on her back step for two years, and she watered it faithfully, and she never once put it in the ground.

It came off her aunt's bush the spring she moved to the rented place on the creek. A good stout cutting with three shoots on it. She set it in water on the step and it rooted the way lilacs do, white threads going every direction in the bucket, and it leafed out that first May and looked like something.

The second May it looked about the same.

By the third it was still alive and it had not gotten one inch bigger, and Junie knew exactly why and would not have said it out loud. If it was in a bucket, it could go with her. She had rented that house for nine years and she still packed like somebody who might be leaving. She did not hang anything heavy. She kept the good dishes in the box they came in.

Ivadell Sturgill lived across the road and was eighty-one and had been looking at that bucket every day for two years from her own kitchen window.

And one Thursday in April, while Junie was at work, Ivadell came over with a spade and a wheelbarrow of creek dirt and dug a hole at the corner of the porch where the water comes off the roof, and she got that lilac out of the bucket, and she planted it.

Then she rinsed the bucket out and turned it upside down on the step and went home.

Junie pulled in at six and saw the bucket upside down and got out of the car and stood there. She was angry for about four seconds. She could feel the four seconds go by.

Then she sat down on her own back step in her work clothes.

She went over the next evening and Ivadell had her supper on and did not apologize for one thing. All she said was this:

"Honey, roots have to be in something. It was going to live in that bucket a long time and never once bloom."

The lilac dropped every leaf it had inside a week and looked dead as a fence post, and Junie thought that was the end of it, and Ivadell said give it until April.

It came out that next April and it has been coming out ever since. It is taller than the porch rail now. It is the first thing anybody sees when they turn in off the road.

And Ivadell told her, the way old women tell you things while they are shelling beans, that every lilac on that creek came off one bush somebody carried over the mountain in a coffee can, and that there is not a house on that road that does not have a piece of it.

Planted, and not by yourself

There is a line in Psalm 92 that people quote for the flourishing and skip past the verb that makes it possible.

Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God.Psalm 92:13

Planted. Somebody did that. It is not a thing a tree accomplishes.

Nobody in that verse rooted himself, chose his own corner, or earned his square foot of ground. The planting is done to him, by the One whose house it is, and everything after it follows from that one passive verb.

You did not get yourself into that room, and you cannot get yourself out of belonging by using the side door. That is not me talking you into feeling better. The written word says planted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the putting, and He has never yet set something in the ground and then forgotten where He put it.

Now let me say the true thing about your four minutes, because I know it is not indifference.

You leave during the last verse because it is easier for everybody. That is genuinely how you have been thinking about it. If you go while the singing is still up, nobody at the door has to do the small work of placing you. Nobody has to run the quick search, third row, comes most weeks, name is something with a J. Nobody has to say are you new for the fourth year running and then be embarrassed about it.

So you spare them. It is a real kindness and it comes from a real thoughtfulness in you, and it has quietly cost you six years.

Because a plant in a bucket of water is alive. It is green. It is not dying and nobody looking at it would say it was in trouble. It just does not get any bigger, and it never blooms, and the reason is not the water.

Roots have to be in something, and yours already are, whether you have felt it yet or not. The word puts you in the house before it says a word about flourishing, and the Spirit who planted you there is not waiting on you to be recognized at the door before it counts.

Here is what the psalm does not say, and this is the part that takes the weight off.

It does not say those that be given a job. It does not say those that be noticed, elected, thanked, called on to read, or known by name at the door. Every one of those is a fine thing and none of them is in the verse. The verse says planted, and then it says the courts of our God, and the courts are simply where the planted thing is standing.

Your ordinary presence in that room is not a placeholder. It is the thing itself. Scripture is not describing a promotion, and the Spirit is not running an audition in there.

And I will tell you what I have seen, in small buildings, for years. The people who hold a gathering together are almost never the ones anybody would name. They are the ones who are simply there, again, in the same general area, for a decade, and the room has quietly organized itself around the fact of them without one person noticing it happen.

You are one of those, and it started long before you believed it. The word says the planting is God's own act, and the Spirit inside you is the same Spirit at work in everybody in that room, which is what makes it one body and not a hundred visitors.