Three Trees

Although the weather is getting warmer and summer is here, I cannot help but be preoccupied with an image from last winter. Now, I do not consider myself a particularly cold and biting person who frequently delights in thinking about the colder, darker part of the year in order to somehow obnoxiously rain on someone’s springtime parade. This would especially be annoying considering that we are just starting to see the rays of summer sneak under the exit door of an already lively spring. Nor am I a person who lives in some sort of inward perpetual winter and sulks and writhes about like a fish trapped on a rock advertising to everyone that I am out of my element. But I do feel the need to share that it is an image from a very cold and rather harsh January that I cannot shed from my mind three weeks into June.

Towards the end of January, I was driving down Man O’ War Boulevard towards Todd’s Road. The great and ravaging ice storm had just hit the city of Lexington making the landscape look less like the Bluegrass State and more like the cold and icy planet of some far off galaxy. It was on my right. An image that I had seen numerous times in the last week, but a stoplight allowed me time to pause and truly see. The image was a row of trees, three of them, lining the street. These three trees once stood elegant, green, and strong. But now a violent messenger of winter had made them white and unrecognizable. Their limbs were encased with a layer of seemingly impenetrable ice that cut off any sign of life. But the part of the image that struck me was their distorted shape. They were so bent, so weighed upon, so oppressed. Three trees that normally stood so tall and straight now looked so broken and in pain, quite frankly.

Now, in order to understand the force of this image upon me it is helpful to understand that over the past few years, enhanced by various experiences, I have been increasingly awakened to the dazzling extraordinariness of living creatures in the natural world. I have been awakened to the scope and complexity of the created order, in part yes. But more importantly I have been awakened to the innocence and preservation of these living things. I have been absolutely swept away by the idea that the horse that I fed and petted the other night has not been tainted by the poison of sin and that all its galloping and chewing is exactly how God intended it to be. The movement of a sparrow’s head mesmerizes me. It does not move smoothly and slowly, but rapidly like stop-motion. The movement of a cat…I must ask if you have ever taken the time to watch a cat move – the way its muscles contract, speed up, and slow down. This is something so fierce and pure. One can notice this in even the most annoying of little creatures such as that particular day when Ashley saw a mosquito sucking blood from her arm, paused, composed herself, and remarked to the little fellow that he was merely doing what he was made to do. I love the naturalness, inevitability, and yet focused intensity with which a dog pants. A human being, of course, has the same sort of natural characteristic when breathing, but the human can also joke about it. He can hold his breath for fun and may indeed get some sort of strange exhilarating feeling by going against this natural process. A dog possesses no such ability giving it a powerful innocence. There is a serenity and at the same time a terrifying glory in these things. When I take a moment and stop thinking about how utterly far away Eden is, I suddenly come to recognize that in many ways it is quite close. When I see a tree rustling in the breeze, a flower blossoming, a woodpecker pecking, an ant slowly and determinedly carrying a piece of food twice its size, or if I get the rare opportunity to see a deer gliding into wooded areas lining the highway, I am seeing worship and looking in on a pristine and shimmering type of being from the first days of creation.

With a teaspoon of tenderness, I say that those three trees out on Man O’ War were once only worshipping God, doing what they were supposed to be doing, lifting up their own hands. Yet, they were broken by the storm, ravaged by it, brought to suffering by it. I, of course, do not know for sure how a tree suffers, but I do know that those three trees simply did not look the same in January 2009. They were hindered from achieving the height with which they were created. They lost branches under the excruciating weight of thick ice. There is a large part of me that simply wants to say to those three trees, “you did not deserve this.”

I’ve also been thinking about Matthew 2, which tells of the great welcoming of Jesus to the earth. How do we welcome the King of Kings to our world? Well, obviously we need the greatest trumpeters, the greatest singers, the most delicious food, the pomp and circumstance of every festival that has ever been celebrated…but that was not what Jesus got. Sure, there were the singing angels and the sincere gifts of the Magi. But this beautiful and innocent boy who was our loving God wrapped in flesh, who would teach us and rescue us, got the opposite in many ways. The result of the collision of the Prince of Peace with our world included horrendous infanticide. This Anointed One spent no time on some delicately jeweled red carpet fit for someone with an inkling of his majesty, but he did find himself spending time on a dusty road to Egypt while fleeing a raging king. Welcome to our world, pure King Jesus. We live in the same world.

Here’s what I am thinking, and I could always be wrong. What seems to be speaking to me here and in the three trees on Man O’ War is something that you may have very well known for quite some time. It is the sober reality that there are times in life when one cannot escape the icy grip of winter no matter how close you look to the heavenly creature you were created to be. Ice storms seem to come even when our lives are overflowing with succulent fruit and even in those wonderful seasons when we come upon a humble certainty that our worship, actions, and thoughts are pleasing to the Lord. I suppose that we could say that Jesus experienced the storm of hardship and suffering, because we were sure to experience the same things. But this is no cause for fear. Because the beautiful thing about being a people of hope is that we cannot help but know that spring is just around the corner and that God’s faithful fingers teem with the sparkle of redemption. Perhaps, it has been my distance away from winter that has helped me see it more clearly – both its intimidating truth and its redemptive foreshadowing. As Chesterton said, “the next best thing to be really inside [something] is to be outside of it.” But it is another image that pronounces these ideas for me much more clearly. As a matter of fact it is an image of three trees as well. It is an image of a lonely hillside just outside of a great and famous city where the purest, noblest, and sinless was not excused from torture and death. But this image also tells me of a place where the sentence of all darkness began to be written with darkness’ own pen and where the guards of the deepest and darkest dungeons were each forced to light a candle that would not cease burning until the Great Rescuer found it.