Bearing Much Fruit
Harvest
When I was younger and could run and not be weary, I would head for the hills and jog upward and onward, leaving the valley behind. My path often wound to an overgrown and forgotten back road connecting two otherwise separate neighborhoods. One cool, summer morning as I took this shortcut, I stopped in my tracks. The ground ahead was covered with apricots—some whole, some smashed, the pit exposed with their fall—and above me were boughs of golden fruit. I had not recognized or even noticed the popcorn blossoms popping earlier on the trees. Apricots are my favorite fruit. I first ate them in the tangy fruit leather my grandma sent to us and fell outright in love while sitting in her trees on a trip out west, eating until my stomach hurt. On the east coast where I grew up, apricots were usually small, bruised, and tasteless fruit, bought for a high price at the supermarket. But these on this road, like my grandma’s, were the real thing—edible art with their blushing hue, that round heft of fleshy softness which filled my palm, the way they broke in half revealing a clean pearl of a pit in the middle.
The fruit grew with abandon in this forgotten orchard, and I did eat. What a contrast this peaceful plenty was to the pace of my life. I anxiously pursued achievement and success, and everything was hard won and hard lost, contingent on my precision and diligence. Yet this harvest was generous and unassuming. The trees, wild with lack of pruning, did not strain but bore fruit because the bearing of fruit was in them. The abandoned fruit was for no one in particular and yet for anyone who passed by. If it fell unheeded it was transformed again into soil to sustain life. But if I or another stranger gleaned the fruit, what delight! It simply was. My heart pounded in the still morning and juice ran down my fingers as the breeze cooled my sweaty body. I ate more. Could I be like these trees? Could I bear fruit simply because it was in me?
Seed
Seasons passed, and early morning runs gave way to mothering nights. One Halloween I helped my son, Isaac, change from Saint George of Merry England sent to slay dragons into a sleepy toddler with teddy bears on his pajamas. I tucked him in with kisses, and stood up to feel the first contractions of labor with my second child. Celia came to stay with Isaac, and Jared and I were off to bring his little brother into the world. When Isaac was born, birth was a fiery dragon and I charged with terrified, blind courage to conquer it by sheer grit and endurance. Although Jared and a nurse attended to every need, I felt utterly alone in my quest to bring new life into the world. Birth was exhausting, filled with trepidation, ending (finally) in joyful deliverance.
What I anticipated being a long night quickly turned into a short and intense birth. Armed this time with new suggestions and months of yoga, I focused on staying open, making low sounds instead of tightening into screams. And in this openness a miracle happened. As I labored with the rhythm and pattern of my contractions, the literal melody in my moaning became a mantra—a song, a devotion. I was no longer trying to give birth—breathing in and out, working with, screaming against contractions—but I was in birth, in the act of giving and being life. And by being in it, both myself and the act were transformed. It wasn’t for me to work hard as much as to let the hard work move through me. What I needed to do was in me. It was already happening, I just had to accept it and let the beauty and pain guide me. I could not have sung this song if I had tried to, for the song was singing me.
As I opened to the grace, I heard not only myself but angels, felt not only the pain but God’s presence. One did not preclude the other. They dwelt together. With a final and not so melodious scream, Peter slid into Jared’s arms. Swiftly the currents of mortality carried me out of eternity and back into time. I put my son to breast and the doctor began to stitch up the tears. This was love and God wanted me to have it more than anything in the world, this being with Him. By abiding in Him, the hardest work of my life, hard enough to break me, became a song, filled with suffering and beauty enough to turn the bitter as sweet as tree-ripened fruit.
Sapling
Three months later, our little family flew over continents to spend ten months in Maputo, Mozambique. Jared had received a fellowship to do dissertation research there, and our adventurous souls leapt at the opportunity. We both had lived and traveled abroad several times before, but never in Africa, and everything from safaris to the chance to serve ignited our imaginations. Jared had served his mission in the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil, so he knew urban poverty. My most extreme travels were to Israel, the West Bank, and other neighboring countries on study abroad with BYU. Jared survived cancer twice in our first five years of marriage. We considered ourselves strong and open. However, nothing prepared either of us for life in one of the poorest countries in the world in 1998, only four years after the end of nearly three decades of war there.
Driving from the airport to our apartment, my innocence died. The starkness of poverty sometimes ennobled and beautified by photographers now stretched unadorned as far as the eye could see. Rickety homes made from straw and sticks waited for a big, bad wolf to blow them down. Lining the roads, women with patient children sold small piles of fruit and firewood while speeding vehicles spewed dust into their faces. Others walked, balancing twenty liters of water on their heads, babies tied to their backs, and hands filled with toddlers and chickens. Street children roved in small packs that made Lord of the Flies seem like a Primary activity. I lost count that first afternoon of the limbs lost to mines and bullets. Friends later told me of sleeping in the river with children silenced at the breast so the guerillas wouldn’t find them. They would return to their homes in the daylight, clean up the mess left by strangers during the night, and continue as if nothing had happened until returning to the river at sunset—a river where cholera and malaria gambled with life and death.
Moments like stumbling into a forgotten orchard, the births of Isaac and Peter, and accompanying Jared through cancer had engraved in my heart a belief in Jesus Christ and the immense healing power of his Atonement. But to be in a place where every person I passed needed more healing than I could fathom set my soul spinning. I couldn’t put the reality down. It was relentless. No matter how much bread or compassion I brought with me, it was gone before the end of the first block.
Even Isaac, at two and a half, saw the hunger and needed to give something to the world at his eye level. Once he saw a blind man, who we passed everyday on our way to nursery school, walking in the distance. He called out, “Hello, my friend, Blind Man,” and then sat quietly for a few minutes as we continued home. “Mom, do you know what? I have two eyes. Maybe I could give one to the blind man and then we could both see.” Oh, my love, and I could give one leg to the mother over there who walked over a mine, nurse the baby crying with hunger, sell all I own to give to the poor, and still there would be no end to the need. You could break yourself into pieces, be eaten alive, and still the hungry would starve.
Blight
Whenever I felt used to this new reality and safely anesthetized from the pain, I was torn by a new agony. I loved Mozambique and her people, but I was crashing into my limits after only a few months. God’s grace had the distance and improbability of Moses’s serpent on a staff. Fiery serpents slithered around my feet and up the ankles of my children. The suffering I saw around me was knocking at my door.
A family from the northern part of the country came to stay with us temporarily. We knew them from church and they were gracious people, destitute but intelligent and deeply spiritual. I felt honored to have them in my home. But my gladness turned to terror the first evening as I found blood sprinkled on the toilet after their son used the bathroom. I found out from the local clinic it was not Ebola or the plague, just a case of intestinal worms; but it took us two months, thousands of bites, and extreme measures to rid our home of the human fleas brought in with their bedding.
Another time Isaac, still so little, burned through the flesh on his perfect leg when he dropped the thermos of boiling water he brought to our nighttime guard. There was no adequate hospital and the embassy nurse didn’t have pain reliever beyond Tylenol for children. I still cringe when remembering his pain.
Was I putting my own children at risk while I tried to fill the world with love?
I knew that “charity never faileth,” but I was failing. And I wasn’t the only one. Many of my friends in Mozambique worked for charitable organizations like CARE and Save the Children. No one was there on holiday and everyone felt the fundamental imbalance of needs and resources.
A friend who had spent the past twenty-five years of her life with her husband in Africa doing everything from digging wells to building schools was heading back to Minnesota to live a small, sustainable life. “I can’t change the world,” she said. “Wells dry and fill up with sand, roads disappear, schools are abandoned, food is consumed, and the hunger remains. Maybe if I can’t change the world, I can at least live in a way that doesn’t hurt the earth and her children.”
Was I the rich young man who loved Christ but turned away sadly when asked to give all? If only it was so simple. I’d give it away, but I had also seen what happened when I gave food to small ones. Bigger people would beat them up and steal the food, leaving the other still hungry and now hurt. I wanted to flee with my own little ones away from malaria, away from cholera, away from worms that burrowed into and drew little pictures in the feet of barefoot toddlers. Away from the maimed, the street children, the childless mothers, the famished cries, the exhausted hope. Home to the safe goodness of fast offerings, organic milk, parks, lakeside walks, casseroles to new moms, and Relief Society lessons. But I knew that back home, stocked pantries and happy smiles often masked profound sorrow and aching hunger. I had read that there must needs be an infinite atonement, and now I knew why.
Blossom
One night insomnia chased me to my journal and I wrote:
Forty days without food, without water
would be a feast compared to this hunger grasping for
our few loaves, our wasting fish heads.
We have gathered our fragments not in baskets but in crumbs.
We are the fragments and they gather to eat us whole.Is love its own hubris, fated to fail when
the weight of humanity lands flatly
like the boulder Sisyphus shouldered, finally too much?My whole life I have heard that
Charity never fails.
Then what is it?
Not only my muscles cramp, but my heart fails.
If charity never fails, then what is charity?
What exists with no limits?I am comforted to know that I am limited.
There is solace in an end.
To know the hungry are filled by
a grace far more infinite than my faith(lessness),
a Charity that Never Fails
which fasted and feasted
forty days without food, without water.
I was laboring with some deeper truth. I was being crushed and paralyzed by the weight of the world, a burden that wasn’t mine for it belonged to Christ. He had borne it and in bearing, redeemed it. I had learned to trust the wisdom and power of birth itself, fraught with pain and beauty. I now needed to trust Christ’s love as an active force which I could let work through me for my own rebirth and the healing of those around me.
Christ’s plea took on a new meaning.
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing . . . Here is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.” (John 15:4-5, 8-9)
Charity was not something I could do or give. It didn’t belong to me. Charity was Christ’s pure love for me, for my little family, for the endless stream of humanity who haunted me with their hunger. In opening myself to this power, I would experience the anguish of mortality. But if I continued in His love, this labor would be transformed; and, while never free of sorrow or suffering, it could become beautiful—a song, a devotion.
Harvest
My friend, Lauren, who was in Mozambique for the long haul with her family, shared a rabbi’s wise words, “It is not your work to save the world, but that does not excuse you from doing your part.” So what was my part? To abide in Christ and let His love work through me to bring forth much fruit.
I began to see that the divine tendency to seek wholeness and to heal was more fundamental than the chaos of suffering. Agony was all around me, but so was joy. Children playing soccer with plastic bags taped into a ball were a testament to the need for play and happiness, not just an indictment of poverty. Mothers who had seen babies starve still gossiped and laughed at the market while singing to living children at their feet. Meals made with a few simple ingredients had more depth of flavor than a meal from a chic New York restaurant. Each wound bore testimony to Christ’s power to heal it. As deep as the pain went, the healing went deeper. Perhaps not always in a way that could be perceived in mortality, but the reality of grace now and in the eternities beckoned. The power to heal lies in the ability to abide the truth of both the suffering and the grace.
One morning Fatima showed up at my door with tiny Naira tied to her back. She had come to visit, but the dust on her feet and the time of the day told me she had set out early. Fatima was one of my favorite Mozambicans. She had grown up in the heart of the civil war, but was beautiful, funny, and laughed with ease. She hesitantly accepted my offer for breakfast. As we sat in the shifting morning light and exchanged pleasantries, I asked her how they were doing with their little store closed for school holidays. She said they were fine and returned to her mellifluous banter, but something in me continued, “Do you have enough food?”
“Oh, yes, we’re fine.”
As one of the wealthier families in our small branch, her reply made sense, but an unbidden question persisted, “Do you have rice?”
She nodded with a carefree smile, but then caught my eye. She hesitated and looked away, silent, and then whispered, “No, we don’t.”
“Oil?”
“No.”
“Salt?”
“Some.”
“Matches?”
“No.” Fatima began to weep. Her family of five hadn’t really eaten for two days, and she didn’t know what to do. They would have enough when the store opened, but that wasn’t until next week. She hadn’t come to beg, but had woken up with an urgent sense to visit me. I listened, and we put together food to hold them over.
The questions were not mine. They were her Father’s who loved her intimately and knew her (His) children’s hunger and wanted them to eat. There were innumerable others whose hunger may or may not have been filled that day, but by some grace I was allowed to bear fruit for Fatima. People need food, but even more they need their reality to be acknowledged with respect and love. And in the end, being able to hear her story openly and become as close as sisters was the deeper nourishment we both received.
When I boarded the plane with my family to return to my “safe” life after nine months in Mozambique, each miracle we witnessed stood in the context of innumerable needs we could never meet. Friends and strangers there and everywhere continue to struggle against odds and terrors I cannot imagine, let alone salve. But I know that God can and will. So I continue in the work of a lifetime—to be grafted to his love, where truth, strength, and grace never fail, even when I do. Abiding in him, my bitter lament becomes a sweet psalm, and I bear fruit to the glory of God, even in a forgotten grove.
