THE PURPOSE OF FRUIT

Today, in a meeting, a colleague opened her laptop and flicked through a piece of work that I'd done, not realising that its author was sitting opposite her. I watched her eyes scan across the page.

"This is just too wordy," she said without looking up, "...and out-dated; I mean it's not very good at all really."

I bit the inside of my cheeks and focused on the clock behind her head. It was 10:55 and the second-hand was jolting round with a silent click. I watched it tick predictably past the numbers: the 4, the 5, the 6, the 7... tick, tick, tick.

What would you have done? Would you have subtly slipped a comment into the conversation? Would you have hinted that it was you who had created this wordy monster? Would you have reacted defiantly, would you have joked about it? I didn't. I didn't do any of that; I didn't own up and I didn't try to defend myself in any way at all. I silently watched the clock as she ripped my work apart.

In the end, she volunteered herself as the solution. "I'll take a look at this... 'beautiful' site," she said, smirking with sarcasm. I did a long blink, clutched my chair with white knuckles and tried to smile. You crack on, love, I thought, somewhat pragmatically.

It hurt a little bit though if I'm honest. I think sometimes we allow ourselves to be defined almost exclusively by our output. I used to take criticism really badly, even if it was intended to encourage and motivate me to improve. Some Sundays I'd come home from church feeling miserable, simply because I hadn't sung loud enough or someone had told me that I was playing too many fiddly bits on the piano. I had allowed my output to become so attached to my identity, that it had become an extension of me - and everything was suddenly personal.

I particularly remember one camp I was leading, when I wandered around the site one night, anorak hood pulled tightly over my head, trying to hide my tears in the rain because a lady had told me that the worship time had made her ears bleed.

How do you deal with it? How do you separate out your work, your art, your produce, your songs, your poetry... from you? Is that even the right thing to do? After all, it's OK to judge a tree by its fruit, isn't it?

I don't have the answers. All I know is that a while ago, I decided I was going to hold all of it very lightly, particularly the worship-stuff. It is much better to give something up than it is to have it ripped away from you, I realised, and I started praying some of the most dangerous prayers of my life. I heard myself saying things like, "God if I never get to play in worship again, I want that to be OK," and "Lord, please help me do this for you and not for me."

I actually don't think that the purpose of fruit is to bring glory to the tree. It's a subtle distinction, but it's an important one. The purpose of fruit is to be delicious for a season, but more importantly, to be the catalyst that reproduces itself in the next. Or, more succintly, as Jesus puts it somewhere: Unless a seed dies it can't produce any fruit at all. I don't want my output to reflect me - I want it to reflect the life in me and the One who put it there.

I flopped open my notebook and clutched my propelling pencil. LET IT GO, I wrote and underlined each word twice.

Good advice.