Don’t tell my husband, (actually he’s fully aware), but I’m having a love affair. It’s lifelong, and it’s with the tall, strong and silent.
Naturally, I’m talking about the wild forest trees I live with.
I have many kindred spirits that adore a good walk in the woods. I have a favourite author who writes entire books that have trees wound into them as main characters in her life’s journey and her family’s home. She is enamoured especially of the cultivated, the planted, the intentional trees. I find I am the flip side of that coin, and am entranced by the feral, the forests that reach well past civilization but start outside my literal doorstep. The roots that flip and grow everywhere but down. The pines that house bears and moose and all manner of wild things.
I walk there and I see a bit of what God had in mind in the beginning…. forests that hem in, that protect, that make a home and invite in, that show off the reaches of His imagination and his creativity with chlorophyll. They aren’t tame, they don’t listen to anyone’s opinion on where to grow or how. They can be dangerous places, of course, I carry bear spray and avoid avalanche zones, but there’s something enticing in that balance on the edge of safety, too.
One of my favourite lines in my favourite book series calls Jesus in allegory, “not a tame lion… but he is GOOD!” I think of this every time I roam these woods that are free of restraint or pruning.
We aren’t guaranteed anything physical in this world, but we ARE guaranteed EVERY spiritual blessing when we are in Jesus. It’s not a safe life in the sense of the temporal. But it is the safest life in the spiritual space of things. These current bodies are not eternal, but our minds, souls and spirits are, and they are kept in the hands of our Father if we’ve put our faith and trust in his reconciling work through Jesus. We can walk through any wilderness of the mind and always be assured of water. We can walk on spiritual water and never sink when our eyes are on the Maker of the seas. We can trek mountains of the soul and never walk off a cliff if we follow the path God has blazed. Through all this, our bodies will get what they need to get us to where the rest of our being needs to be, as God says He knows what we have need of before we ask, so really, even though we may walk through deep valleys and suffer loss of temporal things, we will never lose what we actually need, and what we do lose will remind us that we didn’t need it as much as we needed what God offers instead.
So I’ll keep wandering the woods and stopping to look up at the ancient treetops, and remember the maker of worlds makes the path I’m on, and I can always roam miles and miles while never leaving the palm of His hand.