The Oaken Trouble Tree

It is quiet here. There is no wind to lend its fragrance to the air. The sky is pristine and unmoving; I hear no birds or activity; all is hushed and still. 

The solid branches of the cork oak easily hold up the trouble bundles hung around the tree. It’s trunk is strong and mighty and gnarled with growth, the cork just visible beneath a break in the bark.

It is a lonely place and I sit on the old wooden bench beneath it’s impressive towering to think.

My thoughts swirl around me. I open my devotional and read:

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asks the lame man.”

John 5:2-9

So I ask this of myself:. Do I want to be healed?

I struggle with this concept. It is somehow not the right question.

I think of healing in terms of sickness. I am sick with grief, I suppose, but is grief really something to be healed?  

Is it a wound that can be fixed? A disease to be corrected or reversed to a prior state of health? A condition to be cured?

If grief is a response to deep love then these healing definitions have no part in this.

What if instead, as Webster says, healing is restoration?

My world has been upended and has flown apart. It is in need of restoration; a putting back together of my various parts, restored to wholeness, to Shalom. It is a definition that could work…

I read further

“In the gospels, lonely isn’t a condition; it’s a place.”

Luke 5:16 from The Chosen devotional vol 2

Perhaps grief is less of a condition and more of a place.

What if restoration is not found in the healing of a condition but in the transformation that comes from meeting with Jesus Himself.

He transforms the condition left by grief into a meeting place with Him because He knows how the flying pieces fit back together into His new creation. He knows what new life awaits.

It is in this lonely place beneath the Oaken trouble tree that He meets me today. He takes my hands in His own and with overflowing compassion in His eyes and in His touch,

He asks: “Do you want to be restored?”

Why, yes. I think I do.

Anne

February 25, 2022