Trees and Trust

Surrender

I need to capture it : this experience. I need to remember the thoughts and how they formed in my mind on this walk through the woods. I need to hold the words of my savior, hold onto the words he spoke and the way he is holding me while I am breaking apart and I can’t hold anything together. But as I walked my tangled thoughts began to untangle a bit, to untangle like the knots in my hair when I was a little girl. Sometimes painful, my wild curls would take forever to smooth out and I would squirm and squeal, pushing away the brush and pushing away my Momma’s hand. Kind of like how now I try to push his hand away..the hand of my savior. God’s hand. The hands that literally hold all of this together. The hands that formed me and that are forming me still. Why does the forming hurt? My savior reaches for my hand with his nail scarred hand. My savior suffered what I will never have to know..ultimate abandonment..All guilt and condemnation. He knew..he experienced complete forsakenness and He promises me,”I will never forsake you”. He will never leave me. I will never have to know, to feel that kind of suffering. He walks closely beside me as I walk a familiar path, a path I have walked too many times to count. Like so many times before, I walk to clear my head. Trying to find some answers, looking up at the tall trees that have grown over the years with me. Tall and swaying, they surrender to the wind — The way I was meant to surrender to the Holy Spirit. Maybe that’s how I got so broken. My dad had told me about those great pine trees. He’d said the reason why they were still standing, after Hurricane Hugo tore through the woods behind our house, was because of their ability to lean with the strong winds, their willingness to give into the wind. I had seen it with my own eyes, the way those towering trees would sway. The howling winds shaking their branches, pulling their limbs. I’d watched those tall pine trees give into the powerful pull of the wind, seen the surrender. My father had explained to me how this was the thing that kept those trees standing. What would happen if a tall thin pine were to stay stiff and not sway with the winds? When winds up to 50 miles per hour tore through, the tree would have surely snapped right in half. And all my stubborn standing straight, so often standing against the spirit’s sway —

Oh, wasn’t this the way I had been snapped in two? When I was too terrified to take my savior’s hand and too traumatized to trust, hadn’t I stood tense, trying to stand on my own? Hadn’t I refused his hand? Refused to surrender? But still in all of His sovereignty hadn’t my God known the ways in which I would doubt him and his ways for me? Of course. He knew and he knows all the ways that I will break. My refusal to surrender cannot stop his love for me. No, his promise to me still stands that he will never leave, never forsake me. I walk these familiar paths —paths of doubt and distrust, of fear and failing and of forever feeling not good enough and my sweet savior knows. He knows all the ways that I am broken and that I will break. He sees every hurt, every heartache. Better still, my savior feels every heartbreak as he chose to break with me. And much more than this, he was broken for me. Yes, willingly he was broken apart and the beautiful bond of Jesus with his Father was broken so that I could enter into this beautiful broken, shattered sacredness that is life. My savior keeps reaching out his nail scarred hand to touch mine, his wounded sides, a sacrifice to heal the wounds I am forever trying to hide. This path I walk isn’t clear. It isn’t meant to be. The way I walk is a mangled mess and as my thoughts, I try to untangle I can hear my savior saying,
“Surrender child”.
With curls wild and thoughts tangled, all this brokenness and this crazy life completely mangled, I am just trying to reach out my trembling hand and take the one scarred hand that holds all of this mess together. And let his Holy Spirit form me. To be like the trees and trust.