Pip: There is a post on Between a Father and HIS daughter, home of The Artisans PEN, that asks you to examine your fruit — and I mean that in the most spiritually serious way possible.

Mara: ABASilence Ministries has been writing about what genuine growth looks like from the inside out — roots, connection, and what our ordinary moments actually reveal about us. Let’s start with what a tree’s fruit tells us about the tree.

A Tree Is Known by Its Fruit

Mara: The central tension here is visibility — specifically, how long invisible things stay invisible. Roots are buried, seeds are hidden, but fruit eventually tells the whole story.

Pip: The post opens with Jesus’s words directly: “A tree is known by its fruit. Not by its leaves. Not by how tall it appears. Not by how loudly it claims to grow. By its fruit.”

Mara: That last line does real work. The claim to grow is not the same as actually growing — and the distinction matters because self-presentation and genuine character can look identical from a distance, for a while.

Pip: The post names exactly where fruit shows up — not in major spiritual achievements but in ordinary pressure points. How you speak when frustrated. How you treat people when nobody is watching. How you keep going, or stop, when life gets hard.

Mara: And then it shifts to the mechanism behind the fruit. The post draws on John 15 to make the point that a branch does not manufacture fruit through straining — it simply stays connected to the vine, and life flows through it. The word the post uses is “abiding.”

Pip: Remaining. Staying. Not uprooting when the storm arrives. That framing takes the pressure off performance and puts it back on connection — which is a genuinely different ask.

Mara: The post is honest that this cuts both ways. Comforting, because healthy fruit grows naturally from a healthy source. Sobering, because what is inside us eventually surfaces outside of us — through seasons, through pruning, through growth nobody applauds.

Pip: Anyone can hang artificial fruit on a branch. The real kind takes time, and God, the post says, is not asking us to pretend.

Mara: The closing invitation is simple: stay connected to the Vine. The fruit will come. And that patience with the process is itself part of what the fruit eventually looks like.

Pip: Which raises the question of what we do in the waiting — and what it means to keep going when the evidence hasn’t shown up yet.

---

Mara: Roots before fruit. Connection before evidence. There is a patience built into that sequence that doesn’t ask us to perform.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is growing quietly beneath the surface.