OLD TREES AND THE DENOMINATION

Rick Davis hit another home run with his blog post called When the Old Tree Died I Was There. It brought to mind something in my own experience.

We had a large, beautiful Red Oak Tree in our front yard. Unbeknownst to us, the bark of a Red Oak is a delicacy to squirrels, which we have an abundance of in our neighborhood. When enough of the branches died because squirrels had eaten bark off them, we had the tree cut down and removed. The tree, we thought, was dead.

However, the people who cut down the tree had lost their stump grinder and had to leave a very short stump where the tree once stood. We have built a garden around the area where that old tree had once been and were kind of proud of it.

Low and behold, though, before long shoots were growing out that old stump. They got taller than my head before I decided to cut them off and dispose of them, which I did. However, I did nothing to the stump and today those shoots have come back (See picture).

That old tree has taught me something. It taught me that life is never gone until there are no more green shoots. It taught me that some trees have a great survival instinct. It taught me that even that which grows up wild can have some beauty in it, because it is kind of nice in its own way, even though its growth is uncontrolled.

Now, if I let these shoots continue to grow, I suspect some of them will die. I’m not sure what will happen to them, but it is clear that cutting down the tree did not kill the roots. As long as the roots are viable, there will be life in that old tree.

The short moral of this little lesson is this: What grows from the roots of what we thought was dead might not be as stately as the old tree once was, at least for many years, but as long as the roots live they will put forth growing stems.

In other words, perhaps the tree as we knew it is gone, but the tree or trees that will come can still be beautiful. Maybe the function will change. Maybe it won’t provide shade, but it will provide beauty. It still supports an abundance of leaves, each of which is unique. Not as many as the old tree, but unique just the same.

Methinks this is not unlike denominations.