All posts Trees
9/18/2012 9:20:20 AM
The Facebook post from the preschool director at First Presbyterian Church in Aiken, S.C., read, “A member of the church family was sick and would not last through the next day.” She was writing about a beloved magnolia tree that had lived the past 43 years of its life as the centerpiece of wonder and play on the playground.
Literally now “split,” the tree had become a safety hazard. The tree service crew arrived with chain saws in hand on Wednesday morning. According to the article in the Aiken Standard, they went about their work efficiently and clinically until a group of 5-year-olds from the preschool came out to say good-bye. That’s when everyone seemed to take note, all at once, of the solemnity of the moment – issues of life and death and change and beauty and nature and God.
The tree was affectionately known as “the Dinosaur Tree” because from the base of its trunk emerged a gracefully curved hump that rose up and returned to the earth a few feet away. From a child’s vantage point, it looked like the back of a dinosaur rising from the water. Suitable for imagining all kinds of things, it was the centerpiece in playground adventures for so many kids at FPC preschool.
The children, who watched as the dinosaur tree was taken down carefully piece by piece, will have a particularly poignant story to tell. Something like the day I watched Tony the Pony loaded into a horse trailer to move to another farm when we left Indiana for Florida when I was 6.
I have several tree stories from childhood. I think most everyone does.
My first story is about the weeping willow that adorned the lawn in the center of our circular drive in Muncie, Ind. We only lived there until I was 6, but I remember sitting under the canopy of that tree whose limbs reached to the ground like a great drapery. The real world was shut out and the imaginary world came to life there. When my mother would call, the veil would be lifted and my sister and I would return to the house. Oh, but what fun we had in that oasis of gentle green.
Then there are the tree stories about Hurricane Opal and the massive Hemlock that nearly crushed our house in the mountains while we huddled inside.
I have a photograph of a tree in whose bark appears the exact representation of a horse’s head. Only God could do that.
Being married to an arborist with a penchant for planting fruit bearing trees, I admit that my tree stories now abound. On our honeymoon in France we returned three times to the same park where a cherry tree was heavy with fruit. He would climb the tree and pick the cherries to feed all those who passed by. We ate our fill and celebrated the good provision of the Lord our God.
I have a friend named Pati who used to marvel at the variety of trees God made. Gazing into the autumn beauty or the spring greens covering the North Georgia mountains, she would say, “He didn’t have to do that. He could have just made one kind of tree. That would have been sufficient. How glorious and great is our God who gave us all that!” At which point she would throw her arms wide to embrace the expanse of beauty before us.
If you take a walk in the woods you can also recognize the fallen nature of creation by the decaying limbs and logs that litter the forest floor. Indeed, all creation groans with eager longing for Man’s redemption …
One of my favorite stories is The Legend of the Three Trees. It chronicles the story of trees from Creation to the three whose destiny would provide for the feed trough in the stable where Jesus was born, the boat on the sea which Jesus stilled and the cross on the hill where Jesus died.
The children of God all have tree stories. The Bible is filled with them.
From the creation of all kinds of trees in Genesis 1 to the tree described in Psalm 1 as “planted by streams of living water,” to the tree of life described in Revelation 22 as standing on each side of the river in whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, trees have significance in the Scriptures.
Consider the dove returning with an olive sprig bearing evidence to God’s faithfulness to the restoration of creation after the flood. Read how “the great tree of Mamre” figures into Abram’s story in Genesis 18. Or how trees with palms were directed for use in worship in Leviticus 23:40. Think about the teaching of Judges 9 where the trees seek to elevate a king for themselves, or the entire chapter of Ezekiel 31 or Daniel 4 where the tree is used by God as a metaphor of judgment.
There are stories in the Bible of cedars and poplars, oaks, sycamore, fig, palm, olive, almond, apple, myrtle and tamarisk trees. In the Psalms the trees sing for joy and in Isaiah they clap their hands in praise of God. Absalom’s hair was caught in the branches of a tree and a shoot is promised to rise from the stump of Jesse.
Zaccheus had a tree story.
So did Judas.
If we are in Christ we have a tree story too, for He is the vine and we are the branches.
Adam and Eve have a tree story.
So does Jesus.
So do we.
Tell us yours …