Story of the Tree

Once there were two old men walking down an old path towards the wild country. As they scuttled along the path one man looked up and saw a tree which, to the common sightseer, might have just been another dead tree by the side of the road. Indeed it was rather un-remarkable, and yet somehow remarkable in its un-remarkableness. The man who noticed it, Tom, looked up and pointed.

“Ahoy there, what’s that yonder tree” he spoke.

The other man, Sam, looked up at the tree and shook his head, “That’s the young apple tree”.

“Young”, retorted Tom, “It looks mighty old to me.”

“Aye, it would. But it’s young all the same”

“Then how’d it get to look so old”

“Tis a tragic tale” replied Sam.

“I’d like to hear it, ifn’ you had the time”

~

A long time ago there was a young apple tree, tall and girthy, noble and true. It bore the brightest, finest apples anyone had ever seen. Like anything it had its scars, its faults, and imperfections, but that’s part of what made it so beautiful and wonderful. Just like you and your faults, your little hidden beauties that nobody but those closest to you knows and loves. It was a fine apple tree. One day a young soul came and asked the apple tree for food. The apple tree at first pulled its branches away, but then relented and gave an apple to the hungry young soul. But that soul took advantage of the young tree and stripped it bare of all its leaves, all its apples, and trimmed back its branches. The young tree was desolate, but only for a time.

Once winter had passed, and the young soul left the apple tree, spring came. The pruning made the apple tree grow larger fruit and spurt out in new directions. It was a more glorious tree than ever it had been before. As time went though, more young souls came and took fruit from it and stripped it bare, leaving the tree to re-grow every time. And re-grow it did, as fresh and beautiful as before. You see, the tree did not leave a piece of him behind with each young soul, but simply grew new pieces and let those old pieces die to be consumed or thrown in the brush pile. But the tree longed to find a young soul that would tend it forever and not simply pick him bare and leave him to grow back on his own. He wanted someone to tend the soil and pick sparingly, to prune him back so he could grow even more wonderful, and he, in turn, would always be there to shade the young soul from the heat, and feed it when it was hungry.

One day a young soul came by, and like the others before promised to take care of the tree if only the tree would feed her this one day. The tree, though it had been stripped bare before, trusted this young soul to care for it properly and not to abuse it. And true to her word the young soul didn’t steal all of his apples, only one. But then she left, and what this young soul didn’t know is that when she left she invited all of the other young souls to come and take his fruit as well. You see, it’s not that they had a piece of this tree, but every time this tree was left those other souls would come and strip him bare also, so that each loss was worse than the one before it. And so as she left, the young tree wilted again and it hasn’t born fruit since.

~

“Will it ever grow back?” asked Tom, looking sadly at the tree.

“It may… we’re still in the dead of winter Tom. There’s always hope that when spring comes, he’ll grow apples again” said Sam.

“And then what?”

“I imagine that young tree will wait until someone stays with it forever, or until it is stripped bare again”

“But how can it take it? How many times can it be stripped and still grow back” cried out Tom.

“No one knows for sure, but I imagine as many times as it takes” thought Sam.

“But why would it keep giving away its apples, wouldn’t it be better to just keep them”

“No, no, no. If he kept them they would rot, and fall. They would lay all around him useless and stink up the air, he can’t keep them” said Sam.

And so they both sat, pondering at the tree for a time. For a long while they looked at it, and then, as suddenly as they had come upon it, left.

Reality

Twice I tried to tear tears away.
Three times I tried to turn back.
Thrice I turned toward new causes,
And on the twelfth hour I was damned.

Twice I tried to throw it, tried tirelessly emphatic.
Trinket of ill-tried, empty triumph, failed.
Thrice in tepid waters I gravitated
Toward the murky depths, toward hell.

And on the twelfth hour I was damned.

~

"There is no hope in love, there is no great hope in romance. There is only heartache, or the pacification of all feelings into the duldrums of dispassion. Why else does every great romance end in happy ever after? Or seperation and death? Because happy ever after allows us to leave out the monotony of years of commitment, and the only other option to this petrifaction of love is death. Till death do us part, we or will bind ourselves to the very rocks we cast overboard... I would have death" - Me

~

Today I thought about love and death, nihilism and fate, humanity and despair. Thoughts to glorious and incomprehensible for my comprehension flooded over my subconscious and I was pulled to the written word so as to purge the deepness from me and be cured of it. In here you will find no words of great wisdom, no original thoughts on the origin of our species, and certainly no list of fundamental theological beliefs designed to explain the inexplicable. Only the musings of a boy lost in a world too big for him and too grand for him to imagine.

I looked at the stars last week and saw light, a billion years old, seeping through the atmosphere of our orb, bleeding into my eyes. I gazed and understood that I know nothing. I saw the limit of my understanding in the flashing. For all I knew the universe which gave me light was gone, faded to black one hundred thousand years ago. I will never know. How can one hope to achieve knowledge when the very existence he perceives might be gone and he unwittingly sits upon the brink of destruction. The stars are a humbling piece of beauty.

I thought about love and commitment. I pondered what was their worth. I wondered if I wanted to mean the world to someone, if I wanted to lay my life down at the feet of another and ask them to take it, my thoughts no longer my own, my actions no longer my own. What sacrifice would I be willing to give to love another? What dreams would fade, and which would come to the forefront? What would I leave behind and what would I gain? For to mean the world to someone is to mean less to yourself. There is a bargain, but is it one I may be willing to make? My life on my own, or our life together? I once said there is no great hope in love. I was wrong. There is only hope in love. I once said there is no great hope in romance, but isn't romance a reflection of hope? A belief so pure that logic and sensibilities must, to some degree, be neglected. Because to believe in hope based upon the sum of evidence one can collect by studying our minuscule speck of dust is foolish. I must look beyond, always.

So here I find myself. Nihilism is empty and love is full. In humanity I have seen the most unspeakable evil, and in humanity I have seen the very face of God. There is nothing to give up on unless I first give up on God and on myself. There is a truth. There are no useless souls, no useless humans but those that allow themselves to sit and rust, to spoil. I look at the stars and am not overcome by a sense of despair, but am instead comforted to know that it is not within my realm of control. I did not lay the foundations of the earth, so will close my mouth in wonder. I see the sacrifice of love and realize that I don't choose between love and spiritual fulfillment, but that I am instead choosing between two different loves and two blessed lives. I will close my mouth and worship the One, in wonder and awe. In the tenth hour I am blessed as my thoughts ascend to heaven.

Learning to Lament

This post is long overdue, but finally I have had time to write out a coherent thought. Recently I have found life to very unsettling. So many things pull at my attention and try to grab at me sometimes I feel dizzy as to where I am going. I know that my walk towards Yeshua and discovering the body of Messiah is still in progress, but right now I feel a little dizzy. As a I seek to do all these things yet another aspect of my life is grabbing at me. I am trying to fall deeper and deeper in love with God, and in that seeking I have found that there are parts of my life where I have loved others so deeply that those cracks may never have healed. As I fall in love with Yeshua those things are coming blatently to the surface, and so from those emotions and those thoughts come this blog. I hope that you find it useful to yourself in some way, if not that I am sorry to have wasted your time :P.

Have you ever had a moment where the world around you seems to stop and is replaced by a different world, a world you thought you'd left behind? Where once you stood living your normal life suddenly the moments of a by-gone time, a place, a person, a memory, flood back over and take your senses by storm? Where once you stood, existing in the mundaneness of every day tasks, simply working to try and make time pass by, now time has stopped and gone back and you are once again captured by a feeling that you had believed lost it's grip on you long ago? Suddenly you can't forget what you thought had been forgotten, and you can't seem to move from the spot where that thing you thought you'd conquered has risen from ashes of your memory only to subdue you again. I experienced such a thing today.

The memory, the task, the emotion itself hardly matters. For those curious ones I remembered a girl as I mopped the bathroom floor at work. There she was, not where I had left her. I had left her in my mind. I had moved on; burying what was once there under layer after layer of promises to myself. But today I lamented her. I truly lamented her, and myself. I remembered all the places I had failed her, all the places I had failed myself, and how I had left her to rebuild her soul. I remembered how we had started with such promise and love, and yet in the end I walked away. All of this grabbed me, forcing me to look into what I thought I had left behind. Then just as quickly it was gone, but that slightly nauseas feeling of nostalgia remained floating in my stomach.

It was later I was listening to a series of talks on the book of Lamentations, something I'd started ages ago but never truly committed myself to finishing. It talked about lamenting in a culture of denial. A culture so completely in denial of what it feels and wants and wishes that we cover it up with prescription drugs and self medicating entertainment. There is a time to be angry, to shake our fists, to cry, to weep, to simply look on in despair, and then realize that the worst has happened. There is a time to look at the life we used to live and long after it, to wish that things didn't have to move on. Even though we deeply want them to. There is a time to remember people, and places, and things. Perhaps even wishing that they had ended differently. Then there is a time to move on. Until we properly lament, until we let every single emotion come out and come forward we will never recover. How can I expect to stop grieving when I never finished? I can't. It will simply come back again and again until one day I fully acknowledge what this has done to me, what that memory meant to me. I have to let it come out, or by seeking to repress I will continue to let it grow.

So today I am learning to lament where I have been. I lament those neglected parts of my life. This is, after all, part of the Christian walk isn't it? Learning to become fully human, as I was created? To live the abundant life that Yeshua calls us to? The Way is more than just theology, but a way of living. So today I learn to live by learning to lament.

Change

It's spring out. I like the spring time. Today the clouds dispersed after torrential rains displaced all the mulch from every flower bed on campus. That's the trouble with mulch in a garden on a hill. It floats away everytime it rains. The clouds left too, the wind picked them up and moved moved them, just like the mulch. Nothing stays the same, there is no such thing as consistancy. The mulch will always be moved and the clouds will always move on and then it will be sunny and the sidewalks will be muddy, and eventually it will dry up there dirt will be encrusted in between every little pebble in the rough concrete. There is no consistancy.

I woke up at 11:30am, not quite lunch time yet. I'm not exceptionally lazy, although I suppose one could argue that point if they liked, but sundays I like to take my time. Not that I refuse to work. Once I'm awake and moving Sundays can often be my most productive days, but sunday I take time to relish those moments where I don't have to be up right away. You could say this is a problem. I've relished that extra sleep to much on a school day before and missed a class. That behavior might make your point on the laziness case. But Sundays it isn't laziness, just leasuredness. I made my way over to the village market to get food, scrounge up a breakfast burrito before the dinner across the street closed. I got my food and saw a few people I knew, but their table was full. I wasn't going to be the one to sit a table by myself. So instead I went back to my room with a purposeful stride. After all I had intended to go back there all along, that's why I was leaving. It had nothing to do with the fact that there weren't any open seats. I was busy, it was sunday. The relishing was over.

Grades have been a struggle. I usually do well. Well enough anyway, but this semester it wouldn't be far fetched to say that I'm failing. I'm not failing in the sense of an F. I don't believe in societies definition of what failing is and is not. You are either suited for a task or you are not, but failing is judged entirely upon capability and potential. For that reason I say I'm failing. My capabilities are not being fulfilled. I'm getting lazy. The kind of lazy that makes one relish sunday mornings on a tuesday. I haven't always done poorly. I have been known to, on occasion, have 3.9 semesters. Not recently though.

I walked outside after being a shut in all morning. I'm not as anti-social as I sound, believe me. I am as extroverted as an introvert can be. But silence and solitude are also friends who require plenty of time. Being a writter doesn't help either. I can't write in the presence of people. I have to be secluded, cut off from what's around me in some way. At the moment I'm in the library surrounded by people, but there is a social iron curtain between us. You can be as cut off as you like even surrounded by warm people. Soon though, before long, I will need companionship, conversation, words of affection. Solitude isn't a constant comfort. Soon I will seek out other people.

And so the seasons changed. The clouds dissapeared, the cold was banished. Yet there is no consistancy. Sometimes it returns in bursts, but it is on it's way out I suppose. And one day it will return. Perhaps consistancy only exists in the inconsistancy of it all. Sundays will not last forever, I can be sure of that. Solitude will not last forever, I will make sure of that. And summer will have to go. Mulch won't stay where you put it, and clouds will move on or move in regardless of what you do. All that's left for me to do is accept it. Things move on.

Old and New.

For those of you friends who have faithfully followed me on facebook, my deepest gratitude and apologies. I will be adding, over the next few days, most of my facebook notes to this blog so as to update it with all my most recent writtings. I do intend to add some new stuff here, promise.

Who Is This That Darkeneth Thy Counsel?

Late nights and William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury. Mornings and Rob Bell. Velvet Elvis. There is a hurting world and it revolves around the self, so says 20th century writers. There is a hurting world and it revolves around the our perverted view of the way, so says an ancient Jewish Rabbi.

Learned men gather around the intellectual table of the last two thousand years to discuss the great world philosophies, and the most innovative ideas that can be conjured up are existentialism, nihilism, and humanism. There is no meaning beyond self, there is no meaning, and meaning only comes from the relation of the self with humanity. Humanity is the highest aspiration. Beyond my insights and my knowledge there is nothing. Beyond me there is nothing. I can not even prove that you exist, ergo you have no meaning. I can not prove I exist, therefore I have no meaning. 20th Century Philosophy.

If I was to venture and put in my two cents I would have to admit that of these philosophies only humanism even approaches the truth. I do exist, and although faux-philosophers and so-called intellectuals will tell you otherwise I do believe there is no doubt, at least in my own mind, to my existence. I think, therefore I am. I believe also that I can very much prove your existence. Since the experience of existence is a series of electrical impulses sent and received by the nervous system there is no way to prove beyond what we are given that anything exists. So one must approach the obvious by what we already know. I know that when I touch someone I can feel there skin, and when I talk to someone I can experience empathy. I need nothing more to prove to myself that they are as real as I. My ability to comprehend them without ever being able to understand them allows me to be able to prove their, in my own mind, existence via my experience. By comprehension of their emotions I can prove to myself that something exists which causes me to feel empathy and by lack of understanding I come to the conclusion that this something is altogether beyond myself, therefore making their existence outside of me conclusive.

Judeo-christian theology has never been that concerned with asking questions about whether or not we exist. It is a moot point at best. Followers of the messiah have always been more concerned about how one treats their existence, and how to live it as one should. The life of Christ requires action. You can not sit around wallowing in self reflection and be a christian. There is a message, a Way, in which to live. God says beyond your own existential reality there is a deeper reality that created you. If you wish to live you have to live in harmony with the deepest reality of the there is, God's love, or the law. If others exist, and their existence is just as valid as ours, God says that we must love them as we would love ourselves. This is the law, the way, and if you choose to live outside of the deepest reality in the universe everything will be out of sync. Take a look at the world today, does it look like we are out of sync with the Way? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

I have chosen to live in a world where I am not the only thing that exists. I live in a world beyond that of the 20th Century writers. I live in a world where love means more than self satisfaction, I live in a world where there's a way, a truth, a life. Yeshua is leading me into that truth everyday. The Spirit is guiding me in that way. I am growing into the deepest existence possible, the one where the suffering mankind does matter, that there is ultimate truth, and that I can love that truth. I don't even have to prove it, I just have to live it.

A Declaration of Faith

I am a follower of the Messiah (a christian), a gentile grafted into the fold, a believer in the power and love of the message of Yashua (Jesus), my Lord and savior. I have been freed from bondage by his life, death, and resurrection. The life of perfect love gives me strength to love as he did, the death of perfect sacrifice give me the reprieve of knowing that my sin has been blotted out, and his glorious resurrection gives me the promise that my heart has been fully restored and of a life forever with him. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[a] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16)

I believe in the message of Adventism, but my allegience is to Christ and Christ alone. I believe that the Bible is an inspired revalation of God to his people, and that to know God fully we must know his word. To this end I find the founders of my denomination an inspiration. Their dedication to searching the truth is as astounding today as ever it was. But I am not bound to their finite findings or their opinions. TRUTH is forever growing, we will always learn more and more. My faith relies on Christ alone. "This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." (Roman 3:22-24)

I believe that all who profess Christ are members of the body, although some have varying degrees of truth (WHOSEVER believes in him). I believe love of humanity and a of love of truth. Christ died for humanity. If the life of the very least human was deemed worthy for the sacrifice of my Creator than love for humanity is my highest calling. 18 " 'Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD." (Leviticus 19:18).

I believe that the Church has a responsibility to free people from bondage. I believe bondage can take the form of lies, mistruths and theological errors, but that bondage is also physical. Jesus healed the sick because his heart broke at the site of fallen man. I am to love as he loved, offering the healing power of truth and sheltering those who need refuge. "27Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (James 1:27).

I believe that there are differences between people into how to intrepret prophecy, but that it doesn't matter in comparison to the message of love. Denominations exist for a reason, and I belong to the Adventist Church because I believe in her truth. But I believe that when we let that truth divide our love for eachother as members of the body of christ we have stepped into dangerous ground and are erring in the way of the pharisees. The pharisees sin was that they loved truth more than people, they were so zealous for the law they forgot about mercy within the law. They wanted to keep God's law so well that they missed the great essential. Bless us God that we will not do the same. 17"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:17-20)

I don't have all the answers. I am still studying. Some things I must accept on faith until I can know them more fully. I will continue to question (not discount, but simply be looking for other answers as well), and some I may never know on this earth. But I believe that one day my God will make all things known when I am with him forever. For now we see things dimly, through a vale as the children of Israel saw Moses, but someday all things will be made known.