I like to call it my secret place. Though it's quite available to anyone if you know about it. The little chapel in the woods behind my church is a little slice of peace square in the middle of crazy northern Virginia. You can sit there for hours and never know there is chaos waiting just on the other side of the tree line. When it's hot it provides shady respite, and no matter what, there is always a breeze. The Spirit is alive in that place.
Today I found myself fixated by a certain tree that I guess I never noticed before, even though it is in plain view. It was a tree that looked like it was dying if not already dead...but what most intrigued me was the bark peeling off the trunk. While the outside of the trunk looked weathered and worn, a few strips of the bark were peeled away to reveal fresh wood underneath. Upon closer inspection, there was a variety of new things growing around the tree. I don't know if the tree was dead or not, but it was certainly an incubator of life around it. Oh the analogies that went through my head!
First, the issue of the layers of bark. I have been participating in an online book discussion for "Grace for the Good Girl" by Emily Freeman. We have started off the discussion talking about the "masks" we wear. There are hundreds of women signed up for this. That 's a LOT of mask wearing. And we are finding ways to help each other shed them. Kind of like peeling the bark off a tree.
Amid all this, I was reminded of a favorite verse - Romans 12:2 - "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and PERFECT." (emphasis mine)
Perfect - the word that get us good girls into trouble. I am a word buff, so I looked up the etymology of the word. In its history it can be traced to the translation "to completely perform". But it also has a different history - "to bring to full development".
What a comfort that brings! God does not want us to be perfect. He does not want us to perform. What He wants is for us to turn to him so that we can see we are already perfect in his eyes, so he can bring us to full development.
A friend speculated that the tree had its bark revealed as a result of a lightning strike. And isn't that just what is takes to get us to peel away the masks we wear? Something dramatic occurs to start the process?
The good news is that when we peel back the bark on something that may have seemed dead, we can discover new life. That reminds me of another favorite verse:
"So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!" (2 Cor 5:17)
