The Redeemed Trees of Community

I have just taken this picture and am sitting in the west parking lot of Community United Methodist Church where I pastored from 1997-2000. When I came to the church as pastor, it had just purchased land across the street from this building where a new church building was being planned. No one seemed just terribly excited about the architect's rendering, but everyone knew a larger building was needed. It came to our attention that the old "Silvey Insurance Property" was for sale; it with its 55,000 (is that right???) square feet and thirteen stalls in just one of the women's bathrooms. It was for sale for $3m, we bought it; and praise Jesus, the church is close to having it paid off. Of course there is much more to the story.

One of the parts of the story happened after we had moved into the building in the fall 0f 2007. One afternoon, a man came in who wanted to know about his trees. His trees? I asked. Yes, his trees. He was the city arborist he said, and then he told me the story about his trees. Mr. Jim Silvey, the president of the Silvey Insurance Company, had moved into this his former building sometime in the early 1990s. There was a lot free of trees outside of his office window. Mr. Silvey liked silver maple trees. Somehow he and the city arborist made each other's acquaintance and Mr. Silvey told the arborist about his empty lot and his love for silver maples. The arborist then put out the word to the city construction workers and tree trimmers---if in their clearing of land they came upon a young silver maple tree, they were to call him and he would dig up the tree and plant it on Mr. Silvey's empty lot. They called and he planted and Mr. Silvey was happy. He could sit inside his corner office and look across to that formerly empty lot, now planted with five young silver maple trees, budding in the spring, in full leaf in the summer, golden in the fall, barrenly beautiful in the winter. These were redeemed trees, whose life had been saved, and whose loveliness had been enjoyed because of two men who loved them.

After telling me this story, the arborist and I went outside to look at the trees. They were all healthy and happy and he was pleased.

I did not tell the arborist, and only told my congregation much later in a sermon, about how important these trees had come to be for me even before he told me that story. In the picture, you see the southwest corner of the building where the office is that had been Jim Silvey's became mine. There are large nearly ceiling to floor windows in the office, two which are on that corner. Each morning, or at least as many mornings as I was able to discipline myself to it, I would sit by those windows at a small table with a candle and a bible and a cross, and look out the window across the way at the trees. At that time, I was in a particularly difficult time and I was searching for truth and beauty and revelation from God as to how to interpret best what it all meant. Over the weeks when I began looking at those trees, me always sitting in the same spot, I became familiar with their shape and the variance of heights, the slight differentiation of color of their leaves. I became aware that in one of the trees that I could see most clearly, there was an empty place between two branches that had not grown too close together where I could see clear through to the sky. No branches, no leaves, an empty spot. Over those weeks of yearning for a message, yearning for assurance, I began to realize that as much as God was in the beauty of the leaves, God was also in the beauty of the empty spot ---and that is sometimes the most anguishingly beautiful spot of all. A place where the lack of familiar beauty wakes me up to that place in God's heart that has been emptied for me. It also calls me to realize that there is a hollow place of grace in my heart that should not be filled up too easily by platitudes and cotton candy. Many times that empty place simply is there, and any concern that I have about it is really not that important. It simply is, most of the time. But at other times, when yearnings are real, the way is not plain, my own sinful self is my shame, that empty spot in The Redeemed Trees of Community UMC comes to mind, I remember the events of my life, my life now and into the future, and in a way only God can create, I realize angain the devastating beauty that does shine through.