The Belonging

Every now and then a very dark and scary thought comes over me. What if we don’t actually belong here? What if we simply moved instead of being called? What if we are just plain old people who wanted something instead of humble people who submitted to something?

Big change gets in your grill. It exposes you. It asks you hard questions. And honestly, it doesn’t give much answers.

But I’m finding it isn’t the wide open space of possibility that gives me hope in a God who leads the blind, its the stationary things. The immovable things. Like the cluster of trees that greets you when you first pull into the driveway at Hidden Hollow.

The way in isn’t sexy or smooth. Instead, its rough and uneven. Our driveway, if you want to call it that, lies in big heaps and clumps all the way down. My tires spin every time I come in. When you park, dust swirls in your eyes and clings to your car in thick and steady sheets.

The ground that bumps its way into our driveway isn’t because our gravel hasn’t been spread. It’s that way because of the age old bloodlines you must cross to enter. Every slow lurch to manage past is the thick vein of a well established tree root. The uneven land is evidence of hidden, yet flowing life, from the ground back to the tree root. Hundreds of years are under the skin of our yard where my kids play freeze tag. These trees are the natives we must respect. They shot their roots into this dust and negotiated life from it.

I have a lot to learn from them.

My best friend’s dad, fresh from the chemo chair, was the one who helped me name them. He had eyes to see what I couldn’t: a very mature apricot, walnut and cigar tree.

It takes a man with keen insight, not just to identify trees, but to maintain a curiosity about such things. Only someone who’d been cut off at the base can see the value of a flourishing life. Not because they’ve gained so much, but because they’ve lost so much.

Maybe that was it. The loss that big change forgets to tell you about. All of the children I wouldn’t get to see grow up. The weddings and baby showers I would miss. The emergencies and crisis I couldn’t be nearby enough to enter into. These are the things that new places take from you.

It was up to me to decide if I would offer those losses to my God as a sacrifice of praise or if I would squeeze them to my chest until they passed out.

Small Starts

Its hard to believe we have fruit producing trees at all.

My father had always wanted fruit and nut trees. He placed high value on things that made things. He didn’t want trees that simply stood tall. He wanted them to work for the sun and rain they soaked up. So in my mind the only producing trees I’d ever seen were my dad’s spindly starts.

I can picture them plugged into a plastic pipe and tied with string to help them grow big and bear much fruit. But every time a new start would go in, it felt like a couple of weeks would pass and they would either be eaten up by the deer or scorched by the sun. The fruits trees that came from catalogs seemed to be little teases. They over-promoted themselves in a colorful tag that dangled from their barren trunk. They lured you in with fruit filled boughs. But I’d only ever seen them brittle and skeletal.

As a child of a frustrated fruit farmer, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in small starts. And now as I type that I realize how much that childhood lesson has followed me here too.

Our walnut tree was the largest of the three trees and yet produced the smallest thing. I don’t know a lot about walnuts. And the things I do know are not the important things, like how they grow or what to do with them, but more so what they mean. A month old journal entry jogged my memory of this very thing, “‘a walnut signifies fertility.’ It is mentioned only once in the Bible. The word in Hebrew is ‘egozeymelech’—it refers to the fruit of a king. King Solomon is the only one to pen the word,

I went down to the walnut grove to see the blossoms of the valley, to see if the vines were budding, or the pomegranates in bloom.”

While Solomon wrote these words, his beloved spoke them. She is the one who went to see if the love she had experienced in the past was still there. Am I still yours?

And something pangs around in side of me as I realize I’ve come to Hidden Hollow asking my God the very same thing. I see how the seed of a small walnut has grown into a relational root tracing back to Jesus. Calling my eyes upwards. Do you trust the small, skeletal start of what I am doing?

The fruit isn’t here yet. But keep checking. Keep coming to the walnut grove. Keep asking, Am I still yours?

Because that story never changes.