If A Tree Falls In The Woods

We are blessed to live in what I like to call an urban forest. We're surrounded by trees, but also live 5 minutes from the interstate. So it might surprise you to know that of the hundreds of trees on our property, I have one favorite tree. Just one. It's directly outside our dining room window. I don't even know what kind it is. But it is huge and beautiful and has a giant fork about a quarter of the way up. So it's actually like two huge trees conjoined at the knee.

Ever since we moved in, our arborist has suggested cutting the tree down because it's barely alive. But every year, I look at the very top of the tree and take the 20 leaves I see as life sufficient to spare a chainsaw massacre. I came home tonight, however, to a very large tree branch stretched out from base of my favorite tree and the sinking feeling that it might actually be dead. Despite the leaves.

Immovably shakeable. Unstably solid.
As I stood at feet of my tree, I was struck by the fact that I too am hanging on to things in my life that are very much dead. Like my huge tree, these things are deeply rooted and very much a part of my identity. In fact, at times, I may actually be the whole tree. Immovably shakeable. Unstably solid.

I am struck that I must just pay lip service at times to wanting God to shape me, prune me and give me life. I do, actually, want all of those things. And I do, usually, think that I'm being transformed. But there are times when I'm stopped dead in my tracks. Like looking at that downed tree branch and realizing that parts of my life need to be lopped off and put into a chipper or I might be in for a much greater disaster.

I'll be calling our arborist this spring and saying a tearful good-bye to my favorite tree. They'll leave a stump, though, because the extra few hundred dollars to remove it aren't worth it. And it will serve as a reminder to me of something I loved but that I'm safer without. Much like the branches that God has already pruned from me.