(The header photo is a downed pine near the school gym where my church met for a year and a half after Hurricane Michael. From the road it looked like rays of sun radiating from its smiley face center!)
Charles Westerhoff, a Christian educator, described spiritual formation like the development of rings of a tree… each ring is the building block, the substrate for the next. That tiny sapling, sustained in the nurture of the family, its first identity arising from the other trees around it, and its sapling marrow becomes the substrate and strength for the next season’s rings forming in adolescence, putting down deeper and wider roots, all coming off the taproot that was put down first; then in the widening birth of its canopy it finds its connection to the larger forest and strength discovered in those young seasons of growth prepare the tree for the storms of maturing adulthood during which additional rings may find the tree bending under the fierce winds and tested by drought; and when it has come to maturity, it owns its space, it defines its field, it joins the other giants in the forest and it provides shade and fruit for those who come to enjoy its presence and the tree lifts its branches in praise to the Creator that sowed it in the earth. As JD Walt of Seedbed.com has said, “that which comes first is not wrong, just incomplete.” The sapling grows from functional activity to transcendent receptivity. Sadly, Christian educators tell us most never grow beyond the comfortable affiliation stage of Christian growth into the searching seasons. Too many are isolated and alone and lack the curiosity and direction to find the answers that lead them to owning their faith….. and being truly owned by Christ, a posture that stands and does not surrender to the elements but provides shelter for those who need rest from their labor in the heat of the day….. statistics are that something in the 5% to less than 10% range of Christians reach the final, owned faith stage, but those that do have, hopefully, borne many seeds that will become the giants of future generations of forests.
“The Word is Alive. It is inside you and it is growing. As it grows from the inside out it is demanding that the unnecessary and unessential and the carnal “fall off.” Just as the old bark of a growing tree is shoved off by the rising of new bark.
The Word is “Alive” and “Powerful.” It is rising up and expanding in you! ” By D. Braswell
There is a star at the heart of the Rio Grande cottonwood tree….like God placing His mark there in us, too, the gleam from His eye, His image in our spirit that defines what we will become that was begun when we were children…..
