Beauty Isn’t Found in Gluing Leaves to Barren Trees

Row of Japanese Maples lining our driveway , now sit barren. Yesterday, their strawberry hews, fire blazing reds, pumpkin and canary colors hailed entry into our home.

Now they stand like empty arms, barren sticks reaching helplessly vertical to the sky.

A wind blew in last night.  Without warning.  While fruit bowl colors clung on for life.

But they weren’t strong enough, tough enough, to grip despite their bright appearance, their radiance, or others appreciation.  Even they were victims, suspects, consequential recipients of the weather.

Even beautiful things can fall when storms come.  We too left with simply empty arms, reaching high, digging roots in light of winter coming.

Still something in me stirs restlessly.  I want to grab the elmers and one by one, paste the picture the way it used to be, before winds unwarned entry.  Stick the beauty where I think it belongs…right in front of my face.  Lining the place I know and love.

But then a prostitute floods my mind.  Rahab, inside the walls of Jericho.  Winter was coming for her people.  Nearly all would be destroyed, killed.  Fear roared inside the walls of her people like a wind they could not control.

Furthermore, God’s people camped near their home, praying, ready to destroy their all they had known. (A continual reminder of their certain ending)

I can just see Rahab’s nice colors.  Her bright make-up, and the fine linens she likely wrapped herself in.  But when the storms came and God’s people entered the city….all her elaborate decorations didn’t matter anymore.

She knew she had no other hope, but the God of the Israelite’s. 

So she accepted her barrenness and gave up the way of life she had known….the colorful displays and lifestyle that provided her security and a home.

See, sometimes we know when winters come.  Skies darken, clouds take hold of the land.  But other times, God roars into a land, like an evening wind, like a prayer walk seven times around the fortresses we build for ourselves.

And it is then, we are left standing.  Left standing…and we must choose.  Will we welcome what He wants to do?  Will we leave our beauty lying along the well cut grass, lay down our will, and accept what He has us?

Or will we fight the seasons?  Will we try to pick up our leaves, our vibrant decorations, our colorful representations of who we think we want to be….pasting false yesterdays and uncertain beauties to our barrenness?

Will we try to cover our nakedness? Emulating other non-barren evergreens?

I look at the lined sticks, nothing beautiful about them….no matter how I strain my eyes for them to be.

And I realize….their emptiness is not to be despised.  Their long arms reaching is not some continual life lesson I must look upon.

These trees live uncompromised.  They embrace their identity and sit effortlessly despite the wind that took their beauty.

And instead of fearing them this time….I covet them.  I want to stand too, with my barren limps extended to the God of the Universe. I want to reach and keep reaching….

In winter, fall, until spring comes…and even then through the heat of summer.

I want to do nothing more than live in the reality of His beauty….Whatever that brings me.  Colorful radiance of blazing color….or barrenness, reaching empty arms up into the heavens.

For like Rahab….It’s in the recognizing His Lordship, our own ability to never control the seasons, that saved the few, frees the walled ones, takes us away from generations before that might have polluted us….

For He plants us near fresh water, out in the wide opens….

So that we can stand there.  Unashamed.  Live free from the colors we all paint ourselves with.  Reigning not because the weather is good, or because we deserve anything….

But because He is our maker.  He knows the soil in which life will cultivate the deepest parts of what we need…

And we can trust Him…

Because life isn’t given by gluing color on our barrenness….but by standing vulnerable, openly naked through the storms.  Trusting him….

and knowing that we can be nothing.  While standing still.  Because He is still good….

Despite the storms.

(Linking with Tracy, Emily, Christian Mom, Simply Better)