Abide in Me

I watched three strong men take down a graceful 100 year old tree.  For decades the tree shadowed a neighbor’s yard.  Nesting generations of swooping, singing, playful birds. Home to tail-twitching, chattering, beady-eyed squirrels. She canopied little people’s tea parties and offered a leg up to many a child reaching for the sky.  This towering, full, green leafed tree was vibrant and giving.  Swaying in the glory of God, her bounty free to all- a playground, a resting place for the weary, a cushion for the sleepy, challenge to the adventurous and numerous untold gifts. Her existence alone a gift.

Why take it down? With the screeching swipe of a sharped toothed saw, the earth quivering with repeated thuds of weighty severed limbs, came ground scaring divots. The earth wounded. With each thud I winced, gut-punched.  I sat vigil for hours.  A dear friend, for the last 25 years, was being dismembered.  I am not an arborist, but it was not hard to see that the tree was healthy.  The wood fresh, clear and strong – no decay.  She was still bearing fruit. Still freely giving. Someone decided that tree was no longer healthy or useful or desirable - to them. Tears streaming as lifeless branches were hauled to the screeching, roaring chipper and devoured.  Within a few hours it was finished. Another life snubbed out. Soon there would not be a sign of her past existence and decades before another such as she. So much lost, so many deprived of her generosity.  We had lost another of God’s glorious gifts.

John writes, “…my Father is the vine grower.  He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit.  Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit…” (I ask, why was this tree instead not pruned?)  “I am the vine and you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…”.  As horrifying as the death and destruction of that tree sounds, the gospel goes on to say, “whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch…thrown into the fire and burned.”  This does not sound any better than death by chipper.

Where is the “good-news” in all of this? If I am faithful to God and abide in God, John says, “ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”

Read on…the really good-news comes in the following 3 verses, 9-11.  Love(loved) is written five times, Joy is used twice, abide three times!  “As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love.  The previous 8 versus are not meant to frighten or scare us, but “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”  I ask myself, how was God’s Spirit with me, abiding in me, as I sat in vigil with my beloved tree?   No immediate answer in the midst of pain.  Gradually, I did experience a glimmer of gratitude for the numerous gifts that tree had given over decades. I sat with this, savoring it and very very gradually experienced a sort of joy. There is more here to savor. Death is not joyful. Destruction of creation is painful. I ask myself when and how have I experienced God’s Spirit abiding in me in a tragic moment.  Take your time sitting with Spirit.  Where is God’s lifegiving fruit of joy in my life?  The joy and hope of the Resurrection? Difficult questions, difficult prayer, in difficult times.  In love, the answer, comfort, and the hope and joy will come. The pain and loss may never go away. Maybe it shouldn’t.