Tree Limbs and the Renewal of All Things
From Unsplash
Last weekend, a group of students and our staff took a day trip down to Wilmington, NC to partner with a church and serve local families who were impacted by Florence and Michael. It was one of the first times I personally had gone to the aid of an area that had been impacted by a disaster.
Driving through the town, there were piles of brush skirted to the edge of the road for clean-up by the town public works department. Each resident had something to push to the road: a “signpost” that they were not left unscathed.
Some had it rougher than others. In addition to the piles of brush, large pieces of furniture were stacked next to the road: couches, armchairs, coffee tables, and mattresses waiting for collection, possessions destroyed from water damage.
After arriving at the church and getting our assignments for the day, we set out for the work ahead of us. A group of us went to the pastor of the church’s personal property to clean up his land. In the midst of helping his congregation (and hosting multiple people in his own home), his time to tend to his own property was scarce. Towering pines that I imagined once stood high and mighty with lush greenery now lay crestfallen over the property, decaying. Trees that remained standing had been limb-stripped and swayed in the coastal wind that blew throughout the day.
There was much to do in reclaiming this pastor’s land. A group of us began swinging axes, trimming branches off so that the trunks could be harvested for firewood, keeping in mind that winter was not far off. Others of us used more conventional means and operated chainsaws to start sectioning off the fallen pines into movable pieces of wood.
I had my go at swinging the axe and even had an axe-cutting race with a student (I lost), but I spent most of my time raking the lawn. You would think the ground had always been brown on this land, but all the pine needles from these trees had fallen and blanketed the property, covering up piles of branches that needed to be hauled to the edge of the road for pick up.
It didn’t take long to gather a hefty branch & needle pile to be carted by wheelbarrow. It did, however, take a little while to see progress on clearing sections of the land, helping it come back to its intended appearance.
I raked with persistency, hoping that what I was doing was just as helpful as running a chainsaw. As the rake pulled the needles and broken branches into piles, patches of green began to emerge. Seeing that there was this sense of life, I raked with expectancy that there was more: more green grass to be splashed on this deadwood canvas I had been handed.
In that moment of excavating brilliant color from the ground, I felt like God was giving me a glimpse of something deeper. I raked and listened to the Spirit speak these words:
“In the midst of chaos and destruction, there is always an opportunity for renewal and life to emerge once again.”
I stood there, leaning on the rake for a moment, and then prayed a prayer of thanks for having received such a word. I shared this with a student and went back to raking. We all worked until sunset, packed up our tools, and went home having made a dent in the pastor’s property that still needs much work to be done.
Since then, I have not been able to shake loose that image and those words in my mind: “In the midst of chaos and destruction, there is always an opportunity for renewal and life to emerge once again.”
It doesn’t take long for someone to be walking this earth to conclude chaos and destruction seem to have their way: in nature, in politics, in friend groups, in faith communities, and even in those we dearly love. We all of us have come face-to-face with this in some manner; no one is immune.
Brooke and I braced ourselves for a storm of emotional disparity earlier this year when we were told of our infertility issues. Foundational trees of identity as a man, as a woman, as a hoped-for mother and father, were uprooted and pancaked to the ground. To this day, we are still cleaning up from the damage.
But God has been faithful and, through a long, gradual process, we are starting to see sprigs of green push through. We are continuing to settle and establish ourselves in a new area with the hope that fostering-to-adoption will happen in its time. We have close friends who recently had a baby that we get to go visit, hold, and admire. We have people of faith (local and afar) who are teaching and training us what anchored faith looks like.
Sprigs of green slowly being excavated from chaos and destruction.
The Bible-book, Joel, deals with God’s people at a loss when a swarm of locusts come through to devour their crops. These people’s livelihoods were staked in the well-being of their agricultural craft. Chaos and destruction picked the heads of grain clean, leaving the people with next to nothing.
In these kinds of moments, it’s easy to challenge our understanding of God. I imagine the people making statements like, “God must be angry with us”... “God must hate me” ... “God is playing favorites, and I’m obviously not the favorite.” I imagine these people making these kinds of statements because it is easy for me and all of us to make these statements thousands of years later when calamities strike us.
As God’s prophet, Joel uses the unfortunate events to bring to light a taken-for-granted reality that gets covered with routine, self-preservation, and business as usual: the reality that there is not a day that goes by that we are not dealing with God.
Joel is composed of three chapters in the Bible that can be read in under 30 minutes. I am not going to expound on all the theological implications in this post that these chapters contain, but I am going to come back to the second half of those words given to me as I was raking: “there is always an opportunity for renewal and life to emerge once again.”
After the call to repent that Joel gave the people, there must have been some kind of positive response because the Lord responds kindly...
Then the Lord became jealous for his land and spared his people. The Lord answered his people:
Look, I am about to send you
grain, new wine, and fresh oil.
You will be satiated with them,
and I will no longer make you
a disgrace among the nations.I will drive the northerner far from you
and banish him to a dry and desolate land,
his front ranks into the Dead Sea,
and his rear guard into the Mediterranean Sea.
His stench will rise;
yes, his rotten smell will rise,
for he has done astonishing things.Don’t be afraid, land;
rejoice and be glad,
for the Lord has done astonishing things.Don’t be afraid, wild animals,
for the wilderness pastures have turned green,
the trees bear their fruit,
and the fig tree and grapevine yield their riches.Children of Zion, rejoice and be glad
in the Lord your God,
because he gives you the autumn rain
for your vindication.
He sends showers for you,
both autumn and spring rain as before. -Joel 2:19-23
Even with this devastating loss of crop, there is the promise that there can be renewal, there can be a chance to start over and have the land back to its fruit-producing ways. The people had seen dry-bone scarcity; now they were going to see fruit-bearing abundance once again. They saw the worst; they were going to see the best. God-blessed, God-provided, God-flavored fruits and grains would be put on the dining table once again.
I have this same hope for those in Wilmington. Renewal in the aftermath of chaos and destruction is a welcoming sight—similar to lively green blades of grass cutting through piles of deadwood.
