There’s a parable in Luke 13 that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. It’s short — only four verses — and easy to skip over on the way to something more dramatic. But I’ve been sitting with it for a few weeks now, and I find I can’t quite put it down.

A man has a fig tree in his vineyard. For three years, he’s come looking for fruit. For three years, nothing. He tells the gardener to cut it down — why should it waste the soil? And the gardener says: Leave it alone for one more year. Let me dig around it and put on some fertilizer. Maybe then it will bear fruit. If not, cut it down. (Luke 13:6–9)

That’s it. That’s the whole story. We never find out what happens to the tree.

I think that open ending is the point.

Most of us come to a parable wanting resolution. We want to know if the tree made it. We want to be told whether we’re the tree, or the gardener, or the impatient vineyard owner — and then we want instructions. But Luke 13 just leaves the gardener walking back toward the tree with a shovel, and us standing there wondering.

I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that some seasons in a person’s life look, from the outside, exactly like that fig tree. No visible fruit. No obvious progress. Just someone standing in a plot of ground, taking up space, drawing on resources they don’t seem to be returning.

What stays with me is the gardener’s posture. He doesn’t argue with the owner’s frustration — three years is a long time, and the owner isn’t wrong. But his instinct isn’t to agree that the tree is hopeless. His instinct is to get closer to it. Dig around it. Give it one more season with some actual attention and care.

There’s a kind of faith in that. Not naive faith — the gardener acknowledges the tree might still need to come down eventually. But it’s faith that the problem might be less about the tree’s nature and more about what the soil around it has been missing.

I don’t know who you are carrying around in your heart right now. A child who seems stuck. A friend who’s been in the same hard place for years. Maybe yourself — wondering if you’ve used up all your seasons.

The gardener in this story hasn’t given up. He’s just gone to get a shovel.

That’s enough for me today.