Truth in the Twigs

Casey Pick
Isaiah 11:1–3

This is a true story. There used to be a huge oak tree behind my apartment building. In the summer its leaves cast shade over the lawn, inviting folks to find a moment’s peace outdoors. In the autumn, those same leaves, as long and wide as my hand, traversed a rainbow of colors and fell like rain, until they carpeted the ground for a hundred feet around. That tree told the time and marked the seasons; that tree seemed timeless, eternal. And then one night, the tree was struck by lightning, one of its great branches
falling into the lot where my car was usually parked… and the next day, it was
determined that the tree was too damaged to be allowed to stand — it was burned and broken clear to the core. Men came and climbed fifty feet high to carve away the remaining branches; foot by foot they cut away at the trunk and fed the lumber into a wood chipper until nothing of the giant remained. Nothing but dust, and a stump 43 inches across — I measured — with roots reaching wider still.

Looking out my back door, the sky still seems stark, altogether too bright and exposed, almost naked. More than a year later, I’m still surprised that the tree isn’t there. I miss it. But in that year, as I’ve slowly grown accustomed to the new shape of the world, I’ve watch new shoots grow. Barely twigs compared to the tree that once stood, they’ve sprouted green, grown, and let go their own little leaves in the fall, and as winter comes on, they’re now nothing but sticks standing from that stump — -but they are there, life defying the lightning, defying the chainsaws and the woodchippers and all that men can
do to kill a tree. And while it will be decades before the shoots bear fruit that could create a new tree, and there are a million things that could prevent those bare sprouts from growing tall, they are already bearing fruit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might… and on an Advent night where a writer went hunting for words, those sticks growing out of a stump are the Spirit whispering knowledge and fear of the LORD — and the writer stands on her back patio, and is delighted and grateful. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.