Fallen Tree Meme So Powerful
What a wonderful meme that showed up on a Quora post I saw. A Google search further revealed the image on this religious community’s post.
How many people, and their lives, are like this tree?
How many people started out standing straight and tall with roots buried deep in the ground? Then, at some point in their youth, early adulthood, middle age, or later years find their base just almost completely break?
But these people, like the collapsed tree, manage to keep anchored and rooted. Soon, they start to grow and flourish in new ways. Their previous cataclysmic failures or fallings may even reshape into bricks for the foundation in which they are able to build anew.
Some people may have fallen so many times and had so many cracks in tears in their original base. But they still have managed to pick themselves up and move forward. Sometimes the falls are from life’s slings and arrows. Other times, they are from the person’s own foolishness, carelessness, or corrupted nature.
Fell years ago. Never gave up.
Imagine these words are engraved on someone’s headstone. Or, just as striking, if someone’s obituary or eulogy read such words. Many might be engrossed in the first part: “They fell a long time ago, what a waste.” Others might be in admiration of the latter: “wow, their whole life was a model for perseverance and faith.”
Are we not each of us sometimes broken or fallen? Are not many of the greatest successes when we rise from our topples to rise to new heights unimagined?
Remember when Jesus heard the news his dear friend and disciple Lazarus had died? In many translations and versions, it is the shortest passage of the Bible: “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35). Heartaches, tragedies, and the worst of strifes will certainly break us to a great extent. And as Jesus‘s example showed, it is perfectly okay to fully experience the grief and pain associated with life’s darkest moments. “How could this have happened?” is a normal response to tragic or unimaginably horrible moments and events. Unspeakable tragedies include losses of loved ones, personal tragedies and hardships, and whole social community or group disasters. They can even include the dumbfounded disarray of seeing unthinkable consequences escalating from one’s worst mistakes or misdeeds.
But what did Jesus do after he wept? Why, he went and raised Lazarus from the dead(John 11)! Of course, this was just one of Jesus’s countless inexpressible miracles performed in front of followers who even in those ancient lands flocked to him by the thousands. What are we to do in the midst of our falls, struggles, desparations, and periods of darkness?
Well, that’s exactly when we can tap into the unlimited miracles unfolding all around and allow for the Divine to work through us. For not much later in the Gospel of John we are told: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12). Some of those greatest miracles happen after the most cataclysmic or tragic of events. No matter what has happened in one’s life — and no matter what they may have done — the greatest of wonders and miracles often unfold when things that once were the most perilous become transformed.
