Friday, December 15, 2023

“Do you still not perceive?”

Matthew 16:9

I have felt a certain connection with A. A. Milne’s character, Christopher Robin, since my childhood. Unfortunately, I did not have a stuffed Winnie the Pooh or Tigger or Piglet to play with in my bedroom – although we did have quite a few live versions of Piglet not too far from my bedroom window when I was a kid. And I can assure you that the live versions of Piglet were not the same as the animated version from the movies based on the Winnie the Pooh books. The thing that I did share in common with Christopher Robin was that I had access to my own 100 Acre Wood where I could go on adventures when the required chores for the day were done. Most of my 100 Acre Wood was actually free from wood because most of it was used for planting crops and grazing animals. A lot of trees often get in the way of accomplishing such goals. But, if you ventured far enough away from our back porch, you could find more than a few acres that were still made up primarily of trees and bushes (that we would call brush).

There was one spot in particular where I loved to go when I wanted to get away from everything that was happening in the house or in my life at the time. It took a few minutes to walk there from the house, and you had to cross over, under, or through three different fences in order to get to the spot. Going on those adventures is where I learned that it was best to wear long sleeves and pants when trying to make your way to the back of the pasture. My kids (and others) still give me a hard time for wearing long sleeves and pants in the summer when I am doing things around the house. But when you have been scratched by one too many bushes or gotten scraped one too many times by the dirt and weeds on the ground from crawling under one too many fences, you learn to wear long sleeves and pants to stay safe and scar free.

Usually, I would go to this favorite spot just to get away from things and walk or think. Such adventures rarely had any grand purpose to them. And when I made this walk around our woods, I made sure to stop at my favorite spot – a stump from an old tree that my dad had cut down during my junior year in high school due to some damage it had received in a storm. When the damage had occurred, he used his chainsaw to cut up the tree into small pieces. I, then, loaded the small pieces onto the back of our truck and helped to unload the pieces onto our back porch where we stored the wood for use in our wood burning stove during the winter months to help keep the house warm. What remained in the pasture was a rather large stump that was about six or so inches off of the ground and made the perfect place to sit and contemplate for a while.

Sitting and contemplating were usually my only activities on that stump. However, in my senior year in high school, I also used the spot to accomplish some of the required reading from the novel that we had to read in English 4 – Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It was a wonderful, quiet place to get those assignments completed without many distractions. I found the various themes in the book to be interesting and thought provoking including themes related to relationships between rich and poor, wealth found through hard work and dirty hands versus wealth given through inheritance, love found and lost and found and lost again, learning to live in a society while simultaneously being a social outcast, being surprised by the reality of who turns out to be good and who turns out to be truly evil, and all the time reckoning with fulfilled and unfulfilled expectations that were all great, indeed. And these were just some of the themes that I remember.

Months later, after graduating from high school and spending some time working at church camp, I made a return trip back to the far reaches of my 100 Acre Wood for one last look around before going onto college. And what I found surprised me even more than some of the discoveries in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. Sitting and contemplating on the stump was no longer a possibility. New growth had occurred on my favorite chair in the 100 Acre Wood. Shoots of twigs were coming up out of the sides of the stump. Somehow nature was figuring out a way for life to continue where I had seen only death. My place of respite was gone. But it was exchanged for a beautiful place of growth and promise for the more that was sure to come in the years ahead.

When I first saw the damage to the tree in my 100 Acre Wood, what I saw was destruction and death. I could not even imagine the possibility of life coming out of that destruction. But the new reality that I saw months later was not equal to the initial perception. Likewise, the gift of the Christ child is also often not what we perceive it to be. God’s word shares a message of hope because of the birth of this child. And even in his death, Jesus continues to give hope for life that is everlasting because of his own resurrection from the dead. This kid does things differently. This kid promises change in the way that the world works – including life out of death, and hope for the hopeless. And this kid delivers. Do we still not perceive it?