The Bend in the Branch

In the orchards outside Yakima, Washington, growers practice something called "training" young apple trees. During the first two years, while the wood is still green and flexible, they tie the branches to angled stakes, gently bending each limb toward the sunlight. The process requires daily attention. Too much force and the branch snaps. Too little and it grows wild, tangling into the canopy where the fruit never ripens.

An old orchardist named Dale Meyers once told a group of visiting seminary students, "You cannot bend a five-year-old branch. By then, the wood has already decided what it is." He paused, then added, "But the ones you shape early — they hold that form for fifty years. Long after the stakes come down."

This is the wisdom Solomon speaks in Proverbs 22:6 — "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." The Hebrew word for "train" carries the image of a midwife placing something on the palate of a newborn, creating a taste for what nourishes. It is not force. It is formation.

Parenting is that patient, daily work of bending toward the light while the wood is still young. Not controlling the shape of the harvest, but positioning every limb so that when the stakes finally come down — and they must come down — the child has already learned which direction the sun is.