Deep Roots Ron DeBoer 9/5/2013 Back in mid-July, high winds and heavy rainfall paused summer in our town for a while. Hydro wires came down, power was lost, and big old trees all over the city became uprooted and crashed down on cars and across streets. Canada’s most famous maple tree, estimated to be over 150 years old and the inspiration of a national song written in the 1800s—Alexander Muir’s “The Maple Leaf Forever”—succumbed to the winds of that July storm. People from all over Toronto flocked to the street and stood dumbstruck at this felled maple, older than our country itself. Slowly, people began taking off branches; small children were urged forward by their parents to take a leaf, no doubt to be pressed in a heavy book. A sort of collective understanding and sense of their own mortality befell people as they looked at the plaque commemorating the Englishman Muir, who lived in the house the tree has shaded all these years when he penned his song. All things eventually die, including mighty maple trees. The wind in the still green leaves seemed to whisper it. That tree had been standing during the American Civil War and remained steadfast during the Great Depression, the 1960s counterculture, the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, and the final day of school last June. But like all living things created in this world, it eventually succumbed to the elements. The scene in the newspapers reminded me of the Shel Silverstein children’s book The Giving Tree, a book about a loyal tree who is steadfast and dependable to a little boy through every stage of his life. The Bible uses trees as a significant image, beginning with the tree of life in Genesis and ending with the wonderful image in Revelation of a new heaven and new earth where trees play a prominent role: “Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations” (Revelation 22:1-2, NLT). In Romans 11:17-18, Paul uses an olive tree image to teach the Gentiles that they have been included in God’s salvation plan: “Some of these branches from Abraham’s tree—some of the people of Israel—have been broken off. And you Gentiles, who were branches from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in. So now you also receive the blessing God has promised Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special olive tree. But you must not brag about being grafted in to replace the branches that were broken off. You are just a branch, not the root.” My favorite tree image in the Bible comes from Jeremiah 17. We have read it often during this stormy summer in my family. In the last six months, two of my three brothers have been stricken with cancer; and my niece, mother to three children under the age of five, became paralyzed from the neck down because of a mysterious illness and has been in the hospital since mid-July. We have leaned hard on God during these months. Jeremiah 17:5-8 teaches us not to put trust in what this world has to offer, but to draw from the eternal shade and comfort that our Lord and Savior—the true Giving Tree—offers: This is what the Lord says: “Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the Lord. They are like stunted shrubs in the desert, with no hope for the future. They will live in the barren wilderness, in an uninhabited salty land. “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.”
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 18:59:42 +0000
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