There is a country road not far from where I live that I have driven more times than I can count, but one morning in early spring it gave me something I did not know I was looking for. I was headed to a local wildlife management area before the world fully woke up, camera bag on the seat beside me, fog still thick across the fields. It was the kind of drive that asks nothing of you but your presence.
Cows stood motionless in the grey light, unbothered by the fog or the hour or me. In the fields between on either side of theirs, freshly turned earth sat dark and waiting in rows, patient in the way that prepared ground always is just before the work of a season begins. Through my open window came the smell of true rural country; a smell I call home. It was… damp soil and hay and manure and dew all wound together into something that is just, simply, morning out here.
We had been in a stretch of dry weather for that time of year, the kind of quiet drought that does not make the news but that the land registers in ways you only notice if you are paying attention. I was paying attention, without realizing it. I slowed near the largest cow pasture, expansive and open, with a decent-sized pond sitting near one edge of it. The fog was lifting off the water in slow, pale columns and had caught my creative eye. It was the kind of scene that stops a photographer before her mind catches up with her foot on the brake. That is when I noticed the trees.
There were two of them, standing in perfect alignment with one another, maybe twenty feet apart. The one closest to the pond’s edge was full. Genuinely, quietly full — the kind of lush that does not announce itself but simply is. Even in early spring, even in dry conditions, it held something the air around it did not. The other tree, its near-twin, stood at that twenty-foot distance from the water and it showed. It was not dead; nowhere near. It was not dramatic. It was just… reaching in a way that looked like effort. Tight. It was as if it was straining toward something it was not quite finding.
Same pasture. Same sky. Same drought. Twenty feet of distance from the source, and two entirely different realities. I sat with that for a moment before I drove on. I did not know yet what it was going to ask of me.
I have lived in the energy of both of those trees.
For years I was the one twenty feet from the water, and I did not know it. I thought the straining was just what life required. I was the person who held things together — for my mother as her mind began its long, slow retreat into cognitive decline, for loved ones who were dying and needed someone steady in the room, for a son with additional needs who requires a kind of advocacy that does not clock out. And before all of that, for a version of myself I was desperately trying to hold together with white knuckles and sheer will before I finally laid her down on August 16, 2022.
The striving felt like faithfulness. The exhaustion felt like the cost of loving people well. And maybe some of it was. But underneath all of it was something I could not name for a long time. There was a hollowness that would not stay filled no matter how hard I pushed, no matter how deep I prayed, no matter how much I gave. I was producing effort. I was not producing fruit. And I could not understand the difference.
I was a branch trying to be the vine.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 15, Jesus speaks some of the most urgent words in all of Scripture. He is in the upper room. The hour is close. He is not wasting words on anything that does not matter. And what He chooses to say, with whatever time is left, is not a strategy or a to-do list. He looks at the people He loves most and He says, “I am the vine. You are the branches.“
The mechanics are simple enough that a child can hold them. The vine is the source. It is the life, the water, the everything. The branch is the extension. The fruit is what results when the connection is solid and the nutrients are properly received.
This is what undid me about this analogy: a branch does not work to produce fruit. It does not strain or strategize or manage its output. It has exactly one job, and that job is to stay attached. If the connection is real, the fruit is not a reward. It is simply what happens.
The Greek word translated abide in this passage is meno. It means to remain. To stay. To dwell. Not to visit, or check in during a crisis and leave when the pressure lifts. A branch does not commute to the vine. It does not visit on Sundays and run on stored charge the rest of the week. It stays. And because it stays, it does not have to manufacture a single thing.
Twenty feet from the water, I could see the difference in a tree.
I know what it costs to be that second tree. I know the particular exhaustion of being the person everyone needs when you yourself are quietly running dry. Caregiving at the level I have known it — sustained, layered, with no clear finish line — has a way of training you to believe that effort is love, that output is faithfulness, that the moment you stop pushing something will fall apart. That belief will hollow you out over time. It will make you productive and empty in the same breath.
What Jesus is saying in John 15 is not that effort is bad. He is saying that effort disconnected from the source produces nothing of lasting worth. “Apart from Me, you can do nothing.” Not less, or less effectively. Nothing. That is either the most defeating sentence in Scripture or the most liberating one, depending entirely on which tree you are standing in when you read it.
For me, it became liberation. It didn’t happen all at once, but slowly, the way the tree near water filled out — not through grunting and straining, but through the quiet work of roots that have found what they were always meant to find.
Abiding is not passive. It is not spiritual laziness dressed up in theological language. It is the active, daily choice to remain near the source rather than spending yourself twenty feet away from it.
It looks like bringing God into the hard conversation instead of steeling yourself to get through it alone. It looks like the breath prayer in the hospital room, and the quiet acknowledgment in the middle of the night when your son needs you and you do not know if you have anything left. It looks like letting a foggy morning on a country road speak to you instead of driving past it on the way to somewhere more productive.
Look again at your life. Not at what is not working, not at what is not finished, not at the gap between where you are and where you believe you are supposed to be, but at the source you are rooted near. Look at the distance between you and the water.
Here is what I saw that morning in that cow pasture, fog rising off the pond and two trees standing witness to two different ways of being alive: the lush tree was not trying harder than the other one. It was not more disciplined or more deserving. It was simply closer to what it needed. The fullness was not an achievement. It was a byproduct of proximity.
You do not have to produce your way into flourishing. You do not have to earn the fruit. You just have to close the twenty feet.
The vine is not far. It never was.
Maranatha.
If this stirred something in you, if you recognized yourself in one of those trees, I would love to hear from you in the comments. And if you know someone who has been straining for a long time, running hard and coming up hollow, share this with them. Sometimes all it takes is someone pointing back toward the water.