What’s a walnut tree for? We might think, er, ‘walnuts’.
But really, a walnut tree has two jobs. If at the end of its long life, just before being shafted by a fatal bolt of lightning, a walnut tree could note that (a) it’s been a good walnut tree during its time on earth and (b) it can see five younger walnut trees thriving around it, then it’s OK.
Along the way, it has nurtured dynasties and empires of squirrels and an ecosystem of bugs and birds. Lovers sheltered from the rain and carved their initials on its bark. Families picnicked under its branches. Perhaps it served a makeshift cricket stump. Its lifted people’s hearts, magnificent in the landscape. During the first week in October for five hundred years, generations have gathered its nuts. Even after its death it might have become an interesting line of coffee-tables or (for a certain vintage of male human) a must-have car-dashboard.
During its long life, then, it was fruitful in all kinds of ways that seemed slow and a distraction to the main task. Yet this indiscriminate fruitfulness was its successful ‘strategy’. Those five young walnut trees probably grew because squirrels took some nuts, buried them, and then forget where they left them.
What’s a walnut tree for? We might think, er, ‘walnuts’.
So with ‘slow mission’. We understand Christ’s last command, make disciples of ourselves and of all the nations. But our ‘strategy’ is indiscriminate fruitfulness: being what we are, where we are, as best as we can be. In God’s economy, forgetful squirrels, and time, will do the rest
