Grown Enough to Bloom
Every June, Scottie, our wonderful schefflera tree, starts sending up spikes. They rise straight out of the canopy, long and reaching, taller than anything else on the tree, as if something underneath has finally decided it's time to announce its arrival to the world. I've watched this happen for years now and it still catches me a little off guard every summer—one week just leaves, and the next these tall green wands lifting above them, reaching for something.
Last summer they came in thicker than I remembered, and a few weeks later I walked past Scottie and stopped. The spikes had opened into small feathery flowers, and the whole tree was humming—not quietly, but really buzzing. Bees were everywhere. Patricia and I stood there trying to count them before giving up somewhere past two hundred, all of them working the same small blooms at once, weaving in and out of the flower heads like the tree had become its own little world.
Here's what I didn't know until I looked into it: those spikes aren't new growth in the ordinary sense. They're flowers—an inflorescence, a whole cluster of tiny blooms strung along one long stem. And a schefflera doesn't produce them on command. Plenty of scheffleras, especially the ones kept small and indoors, never flower at all. It takes years of growth, enough light, and a tree mature enough to have the energy to spare. Scottie has been in our yard long enough now to have crossed that threshold. What looked like just another leafy tree had quietly become something capable of a different kind of life.
Paul describes the life of faith the same way—rooted first, then everything else. "Rooted and built up in him… and established in the faith." (Colossians 2:6–7) Notice the order. Established comes after rooted, not before. Scottie's roots had years to spread and deepen before a single flower stalk ever appeared. The bloom was never the first thing. It was the last thing—the visible edge of something invisible that had been happening in the ground the whole time.
Jesus told a strange little parable about a farmer who scatters seed and then goes on with his life. "He knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear." (Mark 4:27–28) The farmer isn't the one making the seed grow. He plants it, and the growing happens on its own timeline, mostly out of sight and mostly out of his control. That was most of what happened to Scottie too. All the years before last summer, when nothing above ground looked any different, something below it was steadily becoming ready.
Paul says something almost surprising for a man so mature in faith: "Not that I have already attained this." (Philippians 3:12) He hadn't arrived either. He was still pressing on. A few lines later he counts himself among "those of us who are mature" (Philippians 3:15) even while admitting he hasn't finished becoming who he's meant to be. Maturity, in Scripture, isn't a finish line you cross once. It's a direction you keep walking, one summer at a time, long before anyone sees the bloom.
Peter lists out a chain of qualities to add to faith, one after another, then tells us why it matters: growing in them is "what keeps you from being ineffective and unfruitful." (2 Peter 1:8) Unfruitful. That word stopped me. A schefflera that never flowers isn't doing anything wrong. It's just not yet doing everything it was made to do. Growth that stalls before maturity is still alive. It's simply not yet fruitful.
And fruit, when it finally comes, was never really about the plant. "Abide in me, and I in you… apart from me you can do nothing." (John 15:4–5) And then the reason for all of it: "By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit." (John 15:8) Scottie's flowers weren't for Scottie. They were food for two hundred bees who found them and didn't want to leave. Real fruit feeds something outside of itself.
Paul pictures the church the same way—everyone growing up together "into him who is the head," the whole body "joined and held together… grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work." (Ephesians 4:15–16) Maturity was never meant to be a private achievement. It's meant to feed the people around it, the way Scottie's bloom fed a whole hovering, humming crowd that had been waiting for exactly this.
Near the end of one of his hardest letters, Paul writes something tender: "We are glad when we are weak and you are strong. Your restoration is what we pray for." (2 Corinthians 13:9) Not perfection. Restoration. The kind of growth that eventually bears something. That's the prayer over all of us—the same prayer that was quietly being answered in Scottie's roots for years before we ever saw a single flower.
If you feel like you haven't bloomed yet, like whatever you're waiting to become still hasn't shown up, that isn't failure. It might just mean you're still rooting. Scottie didn't flower the first summer, or the fifth. It took years of growing where no one could see it. But when the bloom finally came, it wasn't small, and it wasn't only for us. It fed something. Whatever's growing quietly in you right now, give it the years it needs. The bloom, when it comes, won't just be yours.