The Gospel of the Blueberries

There is a patch of wild blueberries that grows near where I grew up, and by every rule I understand about gardening, it should not be there at all. The ground is poor — acidic, thin, rocky in the places it isn’t sandy. Pine needles pile up over everything and turn the dirt even more sour. The weather does what it wants with them. In summer the insects find you before the berries do. It is not the kind of place anyone would choose to plant something they loved.

And yet, every year, those bushes produce fruit. Not in great heaps, and not in any way that would impress someone walking past. Just enough. Quiet, low to the ground, steady. You have to know where to look, and you have to be willing to crouch.

I have thought about those bushes more than I expected to over the years. They don’t seem to mind the conditions. They don’t appear to be waiting for someone to come along and fix the soil. They simply keep doing the one thing they were made to do, in the only ground they were ever given.

And here is the part that has stayed with me: the fruit tastes different. Anyone who has eaten a wild blueberry next to the cultivated kind already knows what I mean. The wild ones are smaller, but the flavor is deeper — sharper at the edges, and then somehow sweeter underneath, the way a good thing is sweeter when it arrives at the end of a hard day. They taste, if I can put it this way, like they earned their place.

When I was a boy, my mother gave me a blanket with blueberries on it. I kept it for years — longer than a boy is supposed to keep such things. I don’t remember the day it finally disappeared; blankets leave the way most childhood things leave, quietly, while you’re busy becoming someone older. But the strange thing is that the name stayed. Long after the blanket itself was gone, “blueberry” remained — a small word that outlasted the soft thing it was attached to. I’ve noticed that’s often how it goes. The object wears out. The meaning it leaves behind does not.

I think some people are like those wild bushes. They don’t grow well in easy conditions. The things that shaped them were rough — acidic, you might say. They came up through ground no one would have chosen for them. And over time something formed in them that simply does not form in gentler soil. Not because they set out to be deep or impressive, but because depth was the only thing available where they happened to be standing.

I want to be careful here, because there is a lie that lives close to this idea, and I don’t want to tell it. Hardship is not automatically good. Pain is not something to go looking for. Difficult soil is still difficult soil — sour, and thin, and genuinely hard to grow in. I have never once been grateful for a hard season while I was inside it, and I don’t fully trust anyone who says they were. To call suffering a gift while it is still happening is usually just a way of refusing to feel it.

So I am not saying the hard ground is good. I am saying something quieter, and I think truer: that God seems willing to grow fruit in places I would never choose to plant anything. Places that look, by every reasonable measure, like they should produce nothing at all.

I used to believe fruitfulness was something you could measure by comfort — that a good life would prove its goodness by getting easier, smoother, more obviously blessed. I don’t believe that anymore. I’ve watched too many comfortable lives produce nothing in particular, and too many hard ones produce something you could actually live on. Faithfulness, it turns out, rarely looks like arriving somewhere better. More often it just looks like continuing to grow where you were planted, on a day when you would rather have been planted almost anywhere else.

Some of the most meaningful things I have ever seen were not produced by ideal circumstances. They were produced by people who kept showing up anyway — to the marriage, to the work, to the family, to the ordinary morning — long after the conditions had stopped rewarding them for it.

There is a kind of stewardship hidden in that blueberry bush, and it may be the part I keep returning to. The bush is not trying to impress anyone. It isn’t comparing its soil to the orchard down the road. It isn’t withholding fruit until the situation improves. It simply continues to produce, according to its nature, in the ground it was given. That is the whole of its work, and it does it without announcement.

I have come to think covenant works much the same way. We tend to imagine faithfulness as something dramatic, but most of it is closer to what the bush does: showing up, remaining present, continuing to offer the small fruit we actually have — and then, crucially, leaving the rest to God. We are not the ones who make anything grow. We never were. We tend; He grows. That quiet division of labor has steadied me more than once, on days when my own soil felt much too poor to be of any use to anyone.

Because the longer I live, the more convinced I am that God is not limited by the quality of the soil. He is not standing around waiting for our conditions to improve before He does anything. He grows things in barren places. He draws sweetness out of situations that, by every honest assessment, looked unlikely to produce anything at all. I have tasted that sweetness in my own life, and I can tell you it did not come from the seasons I would have picked.

So I still think about that patch of wild blueberries — low to the ground, half-hidden among sour soil and fallen needles, asked to grow somewhere no one would have chosen. Some of us, I’ve come to believe, were made for the acidic places. And if we’re honest, the fruit that comes from those places often carries a sweetness that could not have grown anywhere else.