My broom tree

It's been awhile since I've sat to pour out thoughts here. The reasons are many, mainly being busy and also this newfound idea of keeping blog posts around five hundred words for the ease of the reader. That in and of itself was enough to keep me from wanting to write. I pretend no one reads anything I put here and trying to censor myself leaves me unable to even attempt to write anything at all.

Plus how many different ways can you write

~things are hard, still

~He is good

~it's all going to be okay 

~I'm learning

I think every blog post written here in the last five years fits into one of those categories. Or all of them.

I ran out of new words to say the same old ideas.

And a couple of weeks ago I found myself in a familiar place: under my broom tree.

{I can't call it a bush. I have to call it a tree.}

Last spring will forever be known as "the Elijah phase." The spring stretched into summer and I spent days and weeks and weeks studying Elijah.

I literally came away a different person, changed so fundamentally that I think of Elijah and what I learned frequently.

Especially when I find myself back under his broom tree.

Don't worry, he doesn't mind sharing.

"...But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree; and he requested for himself that he might die, and said, 'It is enough; now, O LORD, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers.'"

Elijah had just in the chapter before brought fire down from heaven and here he runs from Jezebel after she tells him she'll have him killed. He flees to the wilderness and crawls under the broom tree and quits.

Yep.

As soon as I realized where I was, I quickly tried to diagnose why I was there. Sin? Selfishness? Self pity? Anger? Exhaustion?

All of the above?

Being the slow learner that I am, it was a little while before the realization came to me that it may be the good Lord's intention that I was here. Again.

As a result of my sin, I'm sure.

Things certainly changed for Elijah once he got to his broom tree, and he never quite recovered. That made me sad. I didn't want the broom tree to be life changing for the worst for me. I wanted to stay here for a while and then crawl back out and get back to it. But I couldn't. I couldn't muster the energy or the determination or the wherewithal to army crawl out of there.

I wasn't sure what to do next.

I asked my friend who recently relocated to the land of the broom tree to send me some pictures of my new home and she soon obliged. I appreciated it greatly. It felt good to see where I was lying.

I think my greatest desire was to somehow honor God while I was under there. I suspected that He stripped away a few of my creature comforts and thus paved a way straight to that tree. I think He wanted me under there to set a few things straight. He certainly got my attention.

I think that I collapse under this tree when my fleshly ways of dealing with this life fail. When I bit by bit start to rely more on myself than Him, easing my way more toward myself than Him, He shuts it all down and I awake to find myself flat on my back staring up at the sky through the branches of a tree.

Disconcerting.

Like a child I start to whine and ask God why I'm there, like an imprudent child sequestered in a time out, squirming in my chair trying to escape far more than quieting myself under this God to hear from Him. My eyes dart, refusing to look Him in the eye, so much like my child caught in a sin he refuses to own. I wrestle and maneuver and justify and question and rationalize and explain, twisting and turning until I spend all of my energy and become still...

Only then can I hear the quiet, the gentle song of creation ignored until I relinquished all of me. In that stillness I hear all of creation quietly singing its praises to the God who holds and sustains it all. And I hear the Lord whisper to me, just as He did to Elijah,

what are you doing here?

I'm not sure exactly how He said it to Elijah. In my head, He was kinder to Him the first time than He was the second time.

And I feel Him say to me again

I need you to trust Me.

Same song, same verse.

So I lie under my tree and will myself to trust.

Because it's hard for me to trust. It takes work. More work and more strength and more than anything I have in me to trust. It's more than just "let go and let God" or study more or pray more or whatever. This takes me to places I don't even want to go or know how to get back from. And more often than not, I get to go alone, because who exactly can go with you with you're learning the hard things from God?

It's usually very solitary under this tree.

 

So what I have decided is this it's okay to be here from time to time. It's okay to learn the hard things from God. And not by any means do I want to appear to have it all together more then Elijah did, but my desperate prayer is not to hear from God and then not come away a changed person. I want my broom tree vacation to change me forever. For the better.

No matter how many times I find myself here.

And that's 988 words. I quit.