They Are Taking The Tree Down

You were not going to drive past it.

You had said that out loud, to yourself, in the car, more than once. You had even changed the route for a while, which added time and which you told nobody about because saying it would have made it a thing.

And then last Tuesday you had a reason. There was a store on that side and it made sense and you know exactly how thin that was.

So you drove past it, slowly, the way people do.

And there was a truck in the driveway and two men with a chainsaw and most of the tree was already on the ground.

The big one. The one at the side, the one you stood under on the second viewing while the agent was talking about the furnace, the one whose shade fell right across the part of the yard where you had already put a table in your mind, with people around it, in a summer that had not happened yet.

You got to the end of the street and pulled over and you did not cry, which surprised you. You sat there with your hands on the wheel and you felt something go very quiet, and you have not been able to name it since.

What went down with the tree

I want to say the thing plainly, because I do not think anybody has said it to you.

You did not lose a property. You lost a summer.

You had built something under that tree. Not a daydream, not exactly. A plan, with people in it: who would sit where, which friend would bring what, what it would be like at about seven in the evening when the light came sideways through those branches onto a table you do not own.

And building that was not foolish. It is what people do when they are about to live somewhere. It is the way a human being moves into a place before the paperwork does.

You are grieving a real thing, and the fact that it was made of plans rather than bricks has never once made it less real. Psalm 56 keeps a whole vocabulary for exactly this kind of loss, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stayed in the car with you at the end of that street.

Then a stranger with a chainsaw removed it in about forty minutes, and what you felt go quiet was the last physical thing standing in the world that matched what you had imagined.

That is why the tree hit harder than the phone call did. The phone call took the house. The tree took the picture.

You have been carrying a grief with no funeral and no name, and a loss nobody else can see has never once been a loss you invented. The Spirit of God is the one who sees a woman sitting in a parked car with her hands on the wheel, and the written word is where God keeps the record of exactly that.

God writes it down

Here is what I want you to see, and it is one of the strangest and tenderest sentences in the Bible.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Stop on the middle part.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle. Are they not in thy book.

This is a man asking God to keep the record. Not to explain the tears. Not to dry them up quickly. To collect them, and to file them, as though a tear were a thing valuable enough to be stored and referred to later.

And notice what is completely absent from that verse. There is no assessment of whether the crying was proportionate. There is no note in the margin saying this one was over a house and therefore did not qualify. The bottle takes them all.

You have a God who keeps a record of a grief that other people would call small, and nothing in that record has ever once been graded for size. It is written that He puts the tears in His bottle and enters them in His book, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that filing on a Tuesday afternoon while a chainsaw runs.

That is what I want to put underneath you this week. Not an explanation. A record.

Because the reason you keep feeling foolish is that you have been trying to get the grief authorized by somebody. You have been waiting for a person to agree that this counts. And the people around you love you and they keep saying it was just a tree, and each time they say it you file a little more of this away as something you should be over.

You were never required to get a loss approved before you were allowed to feel it, and waiting for permission has never once made anything hurt less. Psalm 56 has God collecting tears without asking what they were about, and the Spirit of God is the one telling you tonight that the collection is already happening.