The unusually cool, wet weather this spring has coaxed lavish flowering from our roses and extended the bloom-time of our irises by weeks. 

Our garden has been testifying to the glory of God in technicolor terms – a truly lavish reminder of God’s artistry and heart for beauty.

But the Lord doesn’t just bless me through our garden. He also teaches me through it. 

This past week, the Oklahoma rosebush has served a professorial purpose on two fronts…

First, regarding “suckers.” 

For non-gardeners, a “sucker” is a gullible person – someone apt to trust the untrustworthy, someone teetering forever on the brink of foolishness. 

For gardeners, a “sucker” means something similar but more sinister. A sucker on a rose is a fraudulent branch that grows directly from the root stock, masquerading as part of the grafted-on plant. Leafy but flowerless, a sucker consumes energy without being able to support a single bud.

Our Oklahoma rose was looking particularly bushy and green, even as it was producing fewer and fewer flowers. The culprits, I discovered when I looked closely, were suckers – a multitude of them.

You have to cut suckers off at the base, where they emerge from the root stock, which can be rather thorny work when you are dealing with a big, vigorous bush. 

I found myself literally entangled in the process of pruning… healthy branches and suckers alike scratching my skin and catching on my clothing.

My discovery: suckers grow seamlessly and almost imperceptibly, but require an inordinate amount of time and sweat equity to remove.

Hmmm. 

Questions proliferated in my brain, even as I cut the suckers into manageable lengths for disposal:

How often do I allow suckers to invade my own life – habits and ways of being that mimic discipleship but are actually energy-sapping and flower-less?

How tangled up in my general routine do these suckers become? 

And how difficult are they to remove even when I recognize them – how knotted and poky and prone to draw blood?

For me, as for my Oklahoma rose, the suckers begin in the root stock… they originate at the core, at the heart, and proceed from there unassumingly – as if they belong. 

I am often fooled by them. 

You could say that I can be a sucker for my suckers. 😉

But suckers are serious business, both for me and for my roses, because suckers get in the way of purpose. 

God made roses to make roses – God made people to glorify God – and suckers stymie both roses and glory. 

Silently. Almost invisibly. Effectively.

An interesting thing to ponder was the luxuriant appearance of vigor which the suckers gave the Oklahoma rosebush… once pruned, the aspect of thick foliage and glossy mass was undeniably diminished.

My life-suckers often achieve the same thing in terms of visual “ta-dah!” When I cut back on the busyness, my days can look diminished, too.

That’s because busyness – like a sucker-invaded rosebush – creates the illusion of vitality and thriving. Dashing from one thing to the next, checking off successive items on my self-important to-do list – this can look really meaningful. 

But it isn’t. It’s capitulation to the suckers.

The proof, whether in roses or in humans, is in the actual flowering – or lack thereof. 

Bundling up branches, it hit me hard: a Christian claiming to be obedient without God being glorified resembles a rosebush lacking in roses in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. 

And sometimes, I am that Christian.

Bottom line, when I allow the suckers to proliferate, unchecked, my full days are as purposeless as a flower-free rosebush.

Lesson Number One, encapsulated: be vigilant about pruning!

The second lesson God gave me through the Oklahoma rosebush had to do with AI. 

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to get away from conversations about AI these days. 

At school, colleagues are intimidated and disheartened by the sophisticated ways that students have already appropriated AI – to cheat. 

Friends who are looking for tech work right now are also intimidated and disheartened; will AI simply eliminate the need for their expertise and experience? Will they ever get another job in their field? 

And other friends – book-and-big-idea-nerds, like me – contemplate the implications of a world wholly remade in digital terms. A world reconfigured by people, but increasingly beyond people’s ability to control or even influence. A world along the lines of Frankenstein, or the grim prognostications of Aldous Huxley or George Orwell – only shinier, sleeker, more hip. Those dystopian hypotheses result in (you guessed it) intimidation, and a sense of being generally disheartened.

But the Oklahoma rosebush and my physical struggles with it reminded me quite forcefully that the world – the actual world, the real world – cannot be digitized. 

Smart people may succeed in creating digital alternatives to reality, but reality is and always will be material… the creation of a Creator Who chose materiality, Himself, in order to redeem creation. (What is the Incarnation, if not a Divine Imprimatur of flesh-and-blood as unarguably real – the Life that matters?)

Humans, like roses, are fleeting propositions within this material creation. But eternity awaits humanity, and Jesus teaches and models that even in eternity we will live in actual bodies – substantive, touchable, recognizable. 

AI has no jurisdiction over those bedrock truths. Indeed, the One we call the Way, the Truth, and the Life never intersects with “artificial intelligence” because artifice of any kind is anathema to Him.

Based on my rosebush tutorial, I conclude that the best defense against AI Anxiety is a dose of material reality, a refresher-course in all the real things which cannot be translated into computer code. Hugs, for example. Cups of tea. Books printed on actual paper and read aloud to beloved human compatriots. Rosebushes.

I confess that AI Anxiety grows out of my rootstock as naturally as all anxieties do. 

At my heart, at my core, I am all anxiety, and appetites, and petty self-interest – a veritable breeding ground for suckers (for which I am a sucker).

But… Jesus says,

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been pruned by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you… I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…” 

(John 15:1 – 5, excerpted)

Jesus’s gentle admonition makes clear that the material world is the real world, and the One Who created it remains Sovereign. Fear of AI depends on an illogical substitution of “virtual reality” for actual reality. 

Bottom line, my sucker-prone heart is tended by the One Whose pruning brings the fruit… and He is sovereign not just over my heart, but over the whole material universe. Redemption is more real than AI, any day!

Lesson Number Two, encapsulated: live in freedom, without fear, in the actual world.

The name of this post is “What Lasts.” 

Quite logically, it could have been named “Suckers,” or “AI Anxiety.” 

But neither suckers nor AI gets the last word here, because (ultimately) neither suckers nor AI gets the last word.

So, my friends, what lasts? 

Not technology, however brilliant, innovative, or transformative. 

Not suckers, however persistent, invasive, or vigorous.

What lasts is love: the love of God, which is the source and template for all other love; and the love of people, offered back to God and to one another, by God’s grace.

No threat from within (no sucker!) or threat from without (even AI!) stands a chance against love.

That’s the truth.

That’s reality.

That lasts.