Like Trees Planted by the Water

Near my house is a patch of trees. It's maybe seven acres of black poplar with some Manitoba maple, a few oaks and hawthorn bushes on a piece of swampy low lying ground by the railroad tracks. It's been approximately the same size and shape as far back as I remember. I once saw an appraisal of that quarter of farmland done many years ago and the patch of trees described there then was just about the same as it sits now. In the summertime cattle lie down under the trees when it's hot. My family goes walking back there and I walk back there by myself to think stuff over or with a friend when we have something to talk about. Some conversations are better while walking among trees. Some conversations are only possible while walking among trees.

One of the things I notice about that patch of trees is how much the same it stays. There's a boggy area on the north side where trees don't grow because it's standing full of water, until the middle of summer on wet years. On the south side there's an old sand ridge from the '30s when whoever was farming that land at the time had to watch the topsoil blow away rather than produce a crop. I still have a fence there now and I imagine some version of that fence has been there for all the years this area has been settled by farmers. Between the fence and the slough and the road to the east and the sand ridge to the west there's really nowhere for the trees to go so they pretty much stay where they are and thrive.

On the other hand I notice how much that patch of trees changes each year. In the long run it stays much the same shape and the same species grow but each year a bunch of new saplings spring up in spite of the cattle and each year a surprising number of trees die. I haul 6-8 loads of firewood out of that little block of bush each winter and this year, like most years, I did not catch up with the deadfall. There's more stuff laying there waiting to be cut up than I got around to harvesting. Sometimes on windy days in the summer the crown will break off half a dozen poplar trees right close together and the trunks stand there as snags until they fall over or I cut them down. Sometimes a huge old tree gets hollow and then finally stops growing. Sometimes healthy young trees that are crowded together can't compete with each other so they all give up at the same time. New saplings rarely grow among the established trees. Most often the saplings grow around the edges and a clear area gradually develops in the middle. Then eventually when the clear area is big enough the saplings grow in the middle while the old trees stand around the edge. Over all the area stays healthy and thriving but stuff comes and goes at an amazing pace when you start looking at the process more closely.

My life is like that and maybe yours is too. My family is like that. My church is like that. In order to stay healthy and appear to be filling about the same role as we have in the past there needs to be an amazing pace of change. Last night I took a computer and some sound gear to the church and recorded Charlene, Linden, Connor, and Arianna singing, playing instruments, reading scripture, and praying so Pastor Russell can post a worship service on the church website and we can all stream it through our phones because there's no public gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even the words of that sentence would not have made sense a few years ago, let alone the situation they describe. We had a good time and recording church for later broadcast is a lot of fun. More people 'attend' our church online than did when we all showed up in the same room which is sort of encouraging and discouraging at the same time. It's different from a building full of people on Sunday morning but it is still worshipful. My family enjoys listening to church online. If you had told me two years ago that I would be at home on Sunday mornings listening to internet church I would have laughed out loud since such a thing seemed so completely unlikely but now we do it each week and look forward to it. Our church has continued to be the church for one another and to God's glory because all kinds of new saplings spring up and as stuff we used to do falls away. We are aware of God's faithfulness when we roll with the situations we find ourselves in and become aware of God's Spirit moving among us. We don't choose between continuing our traditions and doing new things. We continue our tradition of faith by doing new things.