When Trees Fall

These tears were not supposed to be here; running down my raw red earth into an empty chasm. They were supposed to remain outside, flying in the wild winds that beat against our bulletproof glasshouse--like armies ascending their ramparts of a city under seige yet self-sustaining and secure in the knowledge that help is on the way.

But someone has broken into our garden. Not like a petty thief or a shy fox, I'm talking bulldoser tracks. Our garden was supposed to be guarded by seraphim but one of my favourite trees is now missing. Where it had been now lies a sinkhole sized void.

Round about are dried out roots crudely severed. Once buried worms now wriggle about and threaten to consume everything in their path. There are fruits on the ground juicy and ripe; I don't know if I should pick them up or leave them to rot. I can't bring myself to eat them, they'll only be a bitter memory.

While I sit here and release this dam,
I know that the rest of this Eden is being neglected. Yet I can't move. I weep inconsolably. Still this bloody chasm will not fill. It remains agape like a souless Nephilim babe coldly demanding milk from my breast. I come to the edge to spit in it. I approach to curse and throw stones.

Then I slip. And as I slide down the sides I begin to feel the texture of those torn bits. None of them can be gripped or grasped as I plunge into darkness. I feel the stinging pain of each sharp shoot.

At the bottom of the pit I splat into a muddy bog. Jesus is there all covered in the foul stench of its stagnation. His tears wont stop flowing either. We wail together.

And after some time I lean into his chest catatonic and he holds me tight in his grief. Then he says,

"The taproot broke out of our Garden, see."

I look to a hole where this mud is flowing through our boundary toward the darkest places outside our terrain.

"I need you to help me block this." he says.

"What with?"

"Go up and bring me the fruit."

"How Lord? Steep is the height and brittle are those broken shoots."

Then he addresses me by name.

"...where does your tap root drink from?"

"I think it is you Lord. But I'm confused. Is this about me?"

"It's about us my dearly beloved. About all of us. I need you to search the deepest parts of your heart. What are they consuming?"

As he said these words, I recognised my nakedness. Then, I was not just ashamed but horrified at what I saw. For I am not a human. I am a tangled knoted network. I am an organic clump that looks somewhat similar to a cancerous tumour. Attached to their ends were all sorts of things, some of God and some not of God.

In the shock I blacked it out like closing my eyes. Now I was just a dark void with faint echoes of my 'humanity' whispering along its invisible walls. Then I heard his voice,

"Do not be afraid. Look again."

I allowed my self to see. I saw Jesus naked, Jesus the Vine. He and I were attached. My knoted bundle looked rather awkward. He compelled me to let go of the idols I was clinging to with rusted knuckles, so to speak. Seeing the situation I now understood how worthless these things were in my life. So I sprang out those tendrils and dropped those stupid things of the World.

Then he commanded me, "Open!"

And I began to unravel. Parts of me started grasping those walls and I crept up and up, and he was rising with me like a partner in a dance.

When we reached the surface, I saw the fruits still all scattered. Then, while  Jesus held me by the waist--so to speak--I stretched out a tendril and gently picked up a fruit in my new green leaves and hung it on Jesus like a decorative ball on a Christmas tree. And as I did, it magically hooked into His side like a graft and a fresh vitality came back into it.

This I did with other fruits too. And as I did so, I began to notice other branches of the Vine doing the same.

I came to realise this is not my garden. It is His garden and I am more rightly called the cultivated, not the cultivator, though I am a dynamic part of that rich process.