Suspended: When we climb trees
The wind shifted and suddenly the entire top of the tree in which I was precariously perched was swaying. I was tree climbing with a group of friends, but I was the only one up so high at the moment, making the entire experience exhilarating. Voices around me were drowned out by the wind. Clinging close to the branch that was nearest me, I let myself move with the tree and feel what it is to be a tree (it's really fun). Everything was bending so greatly, it didn't seem possible for things to not be breaking. However, a simple look beneath me would provide the answer to this seeming impossibility, for underneath the far-reaching branches was a grand network of roots.
Scraggly, twisted, often unseen, and very deep.
Pushing myself off of the branch I was on, I threw myself back against the harness that I might hang upside down. I had seen a few of the other tree climbers try it, and not everyone could manage to throw themselves back enough. There must be a reflex in the human body that keeps you from spontaneously thrusting yourself upside down while hanging in the air. Apparently, I don't have that reflex. All of the sudden, everything was topsy-turvy, branches became roots and leaf-covered forest ground became my sky.
I was feeling perplexed that day. Perplexed because this life thing is a whole lot more interesting and harder than I thought it would be. I had imagined that if I planned out what I wanted to do before I grew up, it would make decisions 100% breeze and no sweat. But here I was, upside down, the wind swaying me and the tree, and I had gotten to this point of mid-air perplexity through much toil. All my safeguards against hard decisions had failed me.
Little did I know then what hard decisions are actually about. Because what I've learned since that October day in the tree is that it is less about you making the decision and more about you resting in the harness of God's love for you. Sometimes that resting even looks like being tossed upside down and letting the wind sway you hard--for He is jealous for us, and we're all trees bending beneath His wind and mercy.
How silly I can be to think that making a decision is the end-all. It's not. Of course we love to make decisions and have plans, to know how to answer that infamous question, "What are you going to do?" But how many times have I clung to a plan simply to sound put together? To make conversation?
The truth is that plans and goals are useless unless you know your purpose, your identity, and Who you belong to. Otherwise you'll go places to find your purpose, hammer out an identity based off of something other than what He calls you, and you'll try to be your own person, not realizing the strength of surrender to Someone greater than you.
Go ahead and go places, go ahead and do those things, but first take stock of who you are, because it makes all the difference. God is calling us out to greater things than we can imagine, but we have to ensure that we're listening to His voice and allowing it, not our own agendas, to direct us.
A few posts ago, I wrote that contentment is in people, not places. I still believe that to be true, because it doesn't matter where you are if you aren't with people whom you love. However, it is not the entire truth. The entire truth is that ultimately, contentment cannot be found in people either. Your hope, your satisfaction, must run much deeper than fallible people.
Whom have I in heaven but You?
Scraggly, twisted, often unseen, and very deep.
Pushing myself off of the branch I was on, I threw myself back against the harness that I might hang upside down. I had seen a few of the other tree climbers try it, and not everyone could manage to throw themselves back enough. There must be a reflex in the human body that keeps you from spontaneously thrusting yourself upside down while hanging in the air. Apparently, I don't have that reflex. All of the sudden, everything was topsy-turvy, branches became roots and leaf-covered forest ground became my sky.
I was feeling perplexed that day. Perplexed because this life thing is a whole lot more interesting and harder than I thought it would be. I had imagined that if I planned out what I wanted to do before I grew up, it would make decisions 100% breeze and no sweat. But here I was, upside down, the wind swaying me and the tree, and I had gotten to this point of mid-air perplexity through much toil. All my safeguards against hard decisions had failed me.
Little did I know then what hard decisions are actually about. Because what I've learned since that October day in the tree is that it is less about you making the decision and more about you resting in the harness of God's love for you. Sometimes that resting even looks like being tossed upside down and letting the wind sway you hard--for He is jealous for us, and we're all trees bending beneath His wind and mercy.
How silly I can be to think that making a decision is the end-all. It's not. Of course we love to make decisions and have plans, to know how to answer that infamous question, "What are you going to do?" But how many times have I clung to a plan simply to sound put together? To make conversation?
The truth is that plans and goals are useless unless you know your purpose, your identity, and Who you belong to. Otherwise you'll go places to find your purpose, hammer out an identity based off of something other than what He calls you, and you'll try to be your own person, not realizing the strength of surrender to Someone greater than you.
Go ahead and go places, go ahead and do those things, but first take stock of who you are, because it makes all the difference. God is calling us out to greater things than we can imagine, but we have to ensure that we're listening to His voice and allowing it, not our own agendas, to direct us.
A few posts ago, I wrote that contentment is in people, not places. I still believe that to be true, because it doesn't matter where you are if you aren't with people whom you love. However, it is not the entire truth. The entire truth is that ultimately, contentment cannot be found in people either. Your hope, your satisfaction, must run much deeper than fallible people.
Whom have I in heaven but You?
And besides You, I desire nothing on earth.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
The strength of my heart, my portion: this is where peace is found, in knowing that despite swirling storms around you, you have a strong tower, and everything else could fail but He is your portion, He is your extensive root network.
Forever.
So if you find yourself up a tree, dangling somewhere between hopeless and lost, it doesn't matter where you look, up to the sky, He is there, down underneath earth strata, He is there too. Rest in that knowledge and allow His wind to guide you.
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