I have looked up to trees all my life. In the very literally sense that I physically have never been at a place in my maturity where I towered over any tree but also in an admiring sort of ‘looking up’. The strength, beauty, wildness, and upward reaching pose have drawn me into fascination over the years. I will occasionally tell a story about being on a playground in grade school and pretending to slam-dunk on this one tree and then years later coming to the same tree and not being able to reach the branch I had only performed 360 jams on. The tree made me feel young again as it invited me to push off the trunk in order to reach the branch that was year by year reaching out toward the heavens.
Trees teach us things.
Notice in Hebrew the word for tree shares the same root as the word for God, el. An oak, in Hebrew, elon, reminds us of not only the of strength and power and flexibility the tree possesses but of the strength and power and flexibility the creator of the tree possesses. The tree always reaching upward in its slow and painful journey through this world is a reminder of the journey we must take in honesty and love and virtue. So for me, this brings greater weight to the passage from Isaiah that says we will be oaks ‘a planting of the LORD’(61.3) and in John 15 when Jesus says he is the vine and we are the branches.
Now of don’t think this swirling thought is landing on the idea that we are mini gods and godesses rather we are dust, the divine dirt clusters of the world pointing people to the One who gives the breath of life, planted here and now, reaching with the rest of creation gasping and grasping for a bit of redemption. The physical world at times feels like a playground from my childhood only it is much bigger than I once imagined.
