Windstorm Days and Skinny-Ring Years

When I was about six, a terrible windstorm knocked over several enormous 100-foot pine trees in our large yard. As my dad cleared the debris, my sister and I counted the rings on the four-foot wide stumps. 

Some were thick, others skinny. I learned that when a tree has conditions that encourage growth, it produces a thick ring. In a "discouraging year" when conditions are less than ideal, the tree produces a skinny ring. 

Looking back at that windstorm, I’m reminded of a time where I felt a little bit like those towering pines toppled by the storm. I was pregnant with our second child and I went for a routine appointment early in my second trimester, only to be met with words no mother wants to hear: “We can’t get a heartbeat.”

In that moment, my heart shattered into a million little pieces. It was a windstorm that blindsided me. I was supposed to be past the miscarriage “danger zone” of the first trimester. 

That news leveled the landscape of a very tender, personal part of my future, just like that storm had leveled the landscape of my childhood home.

Through the devastation and tears that day I told God, “I choose to believe You are still good.”  

Psalm 46:1-3 reminds us, “God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him. We stand fearless at the cliff-edge of doom, courageous in seastorm and earthquake, before the rush and roar of oceans, the tremors that shift mountains. Jacob-wrestling God fights for us, God-of-Angel-Armies protects us. (MSG)

2011 was a “skinny-ring year,” filled with constant reminders of what was supposed to happen - but didn’t. The windstorms of life can shake to our core and crack us wide open. 

But unlike the trees, windstorm days are not the end of our story. We can stand back up, and allow God and time to mend our broken hearts and souls. We can continue to move forward and hear heaven’s gentle whisper reminding us that there are more rings yet to be added to our “stump.”

What I’ve found is that God’s protection doesn’t always mean prevention. 

The windstorm days will come. 

Life will get messy. 

Our hearts might break. 

But He’ll also be that safe place to hide in the midst of utter brokenness. He’ll be waiting to draw us in and slowly, gently put the pieces of our hearts and lives back together, if we’ll let Him.

Like the tree that suffers less-than-ideal conditions, 2011 left a dwarfed, lean mark on my stump. But today I can say that my skinny-ring year is a part of my story that taught me the healing, restorative, redemptive power of God. 

We can't undo the windstorm days and skinny-ring years, but we can allow them to change us, to shape us, and position us to encounter God in ways that we wouldn't have before. 

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

What I learned from Lucy...

I got a cat about three weeks ago. A friend needed to find a new home and my husband and I said yes right away-no test run, no pictures, nothing. We had blind faith that this would be a huge boost to our quality of life. I couldn’t hardly wait to get her, and hold her, pet her and hear her cute little purring sounds. I even went to Petco and stocked up on toys and catnip to spray on everything so she'd want to be around us. But much to my dismay, when Lucy arrived, she didn’t really want anything to do with us. In fact, she ran every time we made a move toward her. Everything we tried was a miserable failure to get her to like us.

I was sure that she would snap out of it and change her mind over the next few days. But for the next week, not much changed….you could tell she was afraid that we would take her to yet another home and she didn't trust us not to hurt her. Until one day, I was making a tuna sandwich when she ran in the kitchen right up to me. I thought I’d finally won her over, only to find that she had a keen sense of smell and wanted my tuna. I decided I wasn’t above bribing her to win her love and gave her a small piece of tuna. She devoured it and I had found my key to her heart. She warmed up to me a little after that, but didn’t transform our cool co-existence in my small apartment. The only time she would come near me was when she was trying to get tuna. She had figured out it came from the kitchen, so each time she noticed me going that way, followed me in attempt to coax more tuna out of me. I found myself somewhat frustratedly saying to her (in silly cat voices, of course) “You only come around me when you want something! All I want to do is love you! Don't you know that??”

And then it hit me. I finally realized that God has to have some similar feelings toward us. We don’t really care to have anything to do with him until we need something, and then even when all our needs are met, we aren’t content because we don’t like the dry regular cat food, and we want the tuna. Not nutritionally sound, but tastes better to us. So we come to God, rubbing up against His ankles, putting on our best behavior so that we can get what we want. For the first time I thought of it with a new perspective. I guess since I'm not a parent, I'm not faced with this on a daily basis they way most moms and dads are.

I realized that just like my cat, sometimes it's easy to be afraid that God may do something that we don't like, or that will be painful or uncomfortable for us. But this this thought is such a painful exposure that we don't really know his character. We may "know" in our heads what God is like, but if it has truly translated into our hearts and permeated every fiber of our being, it changes the way we think about life, God, our future, the way we trust and how we live. I keep reminding myself that we have to make it our life-long, everyday goal to REALLY, truly and thoroughly get know God. I think we so easily forget that he has our best interest in mind - or maybe deep down don't really believe that His plan is better than ours...I am learning if I can believe that His ways are so much better than mine - even when he gives me what we don't want, and withholds what I do want - my life will not only be simpler, but better, and more worry-free.

But I'm also learning that the decision to trust God's ways is one that I alone can make. Unlike my petty need for my cat to love me, God doesn’t try to buy our love or bribe us. He isn’t insecure, and he doesn’t need our love or approval to keep on being the perfect God that He is. He just keeps loving us, waiting for us, and hoping that we will realize just how much He only wants to hold us, love us and get to know us. But he will wait, and the responsibility remains in our hands to embrace that love and experience the awesome closeness of a loving God.

(Who would have imagined a cat could be so thought provoking??)