Just down the road, nestled in some wildlife-rich woodland, shaded by magnificent oaks, is a little play area where I sometimes take my 2-year-old daughter Hannah.
This autumn those mighty oaks were firing down acorns with fury at innocent civilians.
Falling fast, falling with style – like Buzz Lightyear.
Oak trees, Alexandra Park, Hastings
Autumn’s my favourite season. Well, one of my top 4…
Nature’s firework display.
Fall, with style.
A kind prelude to unforgiving winter.
Being pelted by acorns, I found myself gazing up, admiringly, at these wise old oaks, with their hench trunks, twisty-turny, tangled branches and rugged bark.
There’s nothing ordered about these trees.
Why on earth did their branches spread out from the trunk at such random intervals, and then grow outward in so many haphazard directions?
There may be a scientific answer to the ‘why?’. But the aesthetic effect is one of awesome, majestic magnificence.
Beauty for the beholder.
Dignity in disorder.
If I were God or Nature, I’d have arranged the branches at neat, evenly spaced intervals, growing in boring, straight lines, and there’d be no beauty to behold.
My kids think I have OCD. That’s a term that’s banded about far too lightly these days. I’ve seen the torment experienced by people who suffer genuine Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I don’t have that distressing condition. But I am the type of person who can’t stand mess and if it were down to me, I’d keep all our CDs in alphabetical order…
Aaaaarghhhh! They’re not in order!
Life
on the other hand
isn’t like that.
Like the mighty oaks, Life takes unexpected twists and turns. It’s full of intrigue…
…and MESS!
It has a habit of taking us by surprise.
We often don’t understand the hows and whys of life. Maybe we would choose for life to be easier, tidier, more comprehensible.
Maybe you sometimes feel like screaming, “Why?!”
And even when we know the answers, we might still need to express that cry of anguish, confusion, despair, from the soul.
Even Jesus, knowing
exactly
positively
definitely
why he was on the cross
and why his Father had left him alone,
had to cry out, “My God, WHY…?!”
It wasn’t meant to be like this.
And yet it had to be like this.
Not for his sins, but for ours.
For our healing and wholeness.
For the veil between us and God to be ripped apart.
There was a bigger picture, which he knew.
But it’s hard to see it when you’re peering through a mist of blood, sweat and tears, and all you can do is let out that cry of anguish from the soul.
Jesus was tangled up by the biggest twist in the tale. But like the oaks, he rose magnificently.
And the lives of those who have been through seemingly random twists and turns, tragedy and even apparent failure – often adopt the strength and splendour of those rugged oaks. And could not have come to that place of dignity and beauty without those unfathomable experiences.
When we make Christian teaching all neat and tidy, black-an-white, we do the Bible a gross disservice. But perhaps more significantly, we do a disservice to all those people whose lives have been tangled and messy.
Oh no! Not the DVDs as well!!!
Thankfully, the Bible, with its messy theology, surprising stories and sometimes-only-three-quarters-answered questions doesn’t do bumper-sticker philosophy. On behalf of God, it respects the dignity of people whose lives have been confused, confusing, challenging, incomprehensible even.
What the Bible does more than anything else…its specialty…is to show us what Jesus is like, to point us to him. So that in spite of our twisty-tangly lives, we can find some order, some sense, through being in the one who is not disordered, who knows the end from the beginning, and is never taken by surprise.
Not that the Bible is incomprehensible, but like the mighty oaks, it leaves us in awe and wonder, with a profound sense of something–Someone–bigger than ourselves. Like life, Someone bigger than we can get our heads around.
Although I’m very fortunate not to have faced any tragedies or major difficulties for many years, my life did take many interesting twists and turns in the past (described in My Life’s Soundtrack), for which I am now very grateful.
Sometimes those bends and curves are part and parcel of a bigger plan for growth, for fruitfulness, for Life. There is a bigger picture. Our lives become like those mighty ‘oaks of righteousness’, described in Isaiah 61, bursting with life-giving seed, as we allow God to bend and shape us through the pain and the change.
Remember–according to Isaiah*, it’s the ones who have gone through the twists and turns of being broken-hearted, enslaved, bereaved, deprived, rejected, who become those magnificent, fruitful ‘oaks’.
Watch out, now, for those flying acorns!
*Isaiah 61:1-3
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About Roger
Roger and his wife Janine have 3 amazing, lively children ranging from teenager to toddler; he goes to work for a rest. A trained nurse, he’s in his ideal job, utilising all his skills and passions by running a homeless healthcare service, and learns a lot from the people he works with, including the idea that God is more inclusive than people sometimes give him credit for. To let off steam, he runs reasonably fast around the hills of Hastings (England), where he lives. He sometimes abbreviates his name to Roj and now that he writes for We Occupy Jesus, he’s childishly excited at the idea of being ‘Roj of WOJ’.
