The Tree in the Corner of the Orchard

Margie Doss has sat in the same place at Calvary Grove for nine years. Left side, fourth row from the back, third seat in, next to the aisle end so she can get out for the coffee.

Nine years ago that row was full and she knew every soul in it.

The Pearsons were on her left, and Bill hummed under the singing in a way that drove his wife to distraction. Doris Kemp was on her right with the peppermints. In front sat a young couple who could never get both twins to sit down at once, and Margie spent two years handing crayons forward over the back of that seat.

The Pearsons went to Arizona in 2019 to be near their daughter. Doris moved in with her son in Tulsa and calls at Christmas. The twins are nineteen and away at college, and their parents found a church three miles from the new house, which made sense, and everybody said so.

Since then, Margie has learned the names of nine different people who have sat in that row.

She is good at it. She asks, she remembers, and she uses the name the second Sunday so they know she meant it. Then they get transferred, or they try somewhere else, or things change, and there is a stranger there in the fall.

And somewhere in the ninth year, Margie stopped saying out loud what she had started to think, which is this: I am the thing in that room that does not change, and things that do not change are not people. They are fixtures. You do not ask a fixture how its week was. You just expect it to be there, and it is.

Then in November her son-in-law bought eleven acres out past the Cutoff Road with an old orchard on it, and Margie went out on a Saturday with a thermos to watch two men look at trees.

He wanted to take out the tree in the corner.

You would too. It is crooked, it is going hollow on one side, and in three seasons it has not given him one apple worth picking. Small hard sour things that the deer will not finish.

Ott Deveraux, who grew apples on that ground for forty-one years before he sold it, was leaning on the tailgate. He looked at the tree for a while and said, "Leave it."

Her son-in-law said it does not make anything.

And Ott said, "It makes everything. Every apple you picked off this whole place came off that tree's pollen. It's the pollinator. It doesn't make fruit, son. It makes the orchard."

Margie stood there in a cold field with a thermos in both hands and did not say a word.

She went and sat in her row the next Sunday, and there was a young woman on the aisle end she had never seen in her life.

And Margie said good morning and asked her name.

Ninth time. Same words. Different woman saying them.

Lively stones

Peter has a strange thing to call a person, and he calls everybody it at once.

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.1 Peter 2:5

Lively stones. Living ones. A peculiar picture, because the whole distinction of a stone is that it stays where it is put.

He does not call anybody a visitor. He does not say some of you are stones and the rest are here for the service. He says ye also, which is the widest word in the sentence, and then he says built up a spiritual house, and the house he means is not the building on the corner. The house is what stones make when they stay where they were set.

You are not a fixture in that room. You are load-bearing, and what you have been doing for nine years has a better name on it than attendance. That is not a kind thing to say to somebody in the fourth row. Scripture calls you a lively stone built into a spiritual house, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the building, and He does not lay a stone by accident or forget where He put one.

And look at what Peter says in the same breath. A holy priesthood.

He does not split the room. There is no line down the middle of that verse, with the ones who have something to do on one side and the ones who come and sit on the other. He puts the priesthood on the whole house, which means the woman on the aisle end with the coffee in mind holds an office, and it is not an honorary one.

You have an office in that gathering, and it was not voted on and cannot be revoked by a slow year. The written word puts a priesthood on everyone in the house, and the Spirit who wrote that line through Peter has never once been confused about who counts in a room.

Now let me say the hard part plainly, because it deserves saying.

Nine years of learning names that leave is a real grief and it is not self-pity to feel it. Something in a person quietly gives up after the fourth or fifth round. It is not the leaving that does it. It is the arithmetic underneath: everybody who was beside me got a next chapter, and I got another September.

I am not going to tell you that does not sting. It stings.

But turn it over, because there is a fact on the other side of it that nobody ever says out loud.

Every one of those nine people walked into a room on a first Sunday, sat down beside a stranger, and found that somebody was already there.

That is the entire thing a person needs on a first Sunday. Not a program. Not a title on a lanyard. One person already in the room, who knew the words, who said good morning, who asked their name and used it the next week so they knew it registered.

You have been that for nine people. And every last one of them left better than they came, and every last one of them left, and both of those are true at once and neither cancels the other.

You were the part of that room that was already there. The written word says the stones are built up together into one house, and it is the Holy Spirit who set you in a seat where the ones arriving would land next to somebody who had stayed.

Now, so there is no confusion about what this message is doing.

Nobody here is telling you that you ought to have been asked to do something by now, or that somebody has overlooked you, or that it is time you took something on. Nobody owes you a title, and a title would be no promotion on what you already are. This is not about the people who lead that church, and I have not one word against them to hand you.

It is about a crooked tree in the corner of an orchard, and what it actually does, and how long it can do it without anybody once naming it out loud.

Right now, as you read this, you are being told what you are and not given something new to be. The word of God has said lively stones and a holy priesthood the whole time you have been sitting there wondering, and the Holy Spirit is only now getting the sentence in front of your eyes.