A Tree

When I was just a pinecone, I rested in my mother’s shade, tucked into the foliage and a tuft of earth, backed by a high curve of one of her roots.

I was happy, oblivious to the world around me, thinking about nothing else but when my time would come to be fertilized and planted.

Yes, a pinecone doesn’t have a brain, but it can think. Perhaps in the way the world around it thinks without thinking, following nature’s course in happy obedience to the One who breathed it to life.

Now, I still remember the first day a human walked by me.

There were many other trees around, but I wouldn’t call us a forest, just a family. Without eyes, I looked and listened, and yes, I thought and considered about the scene before me.

A walking man stopped for a minute under my mother’s shade, and he looked at her for a moment, caressing her needles with rough hands, his eyes almost vacant.

He sighed.

“Oh, LORD, how much longer? How long will you linger? My people are desperate. When will the prophet arise, the Anointed One, the root of David?”

He kicked at one of my mother’s roots when he talked, and though he talked not to myself, or my mother, or the forest, we all heard him.

And I wondered, would the Life-Breather answer?

This question lingered with me for years, even when I eventually took root and became a shoot of my own.

The years marched on, and the world changed around me. Generations of folk came and went, as did invaders from other lands. Rarely did the nearby city have true peace, despite its name.

I grew larger, and so did the people’s desperation.

They cried out to their God, wondering if anyone truly heard.

I wished I could tell them I heard, and if I heard then the One who made me must be hearing as well.

As the humans groaned, I began groan from within as well, wondering when my Maker would reveal His plan.

Could He fix this broken world?

Over the years, many of my brothers fell, some to disease, some to the ax.

My own mother was chopped down before my eyes, but I remained steadfast, growing tall and strong, just like my Maker made me to do.

But I felt for this world, all the same, and I wanted to do something.

What can I do but what I’ve been made to do? How can I help when I’m only a mouthless tree?

The Maker allowed me not to change my nature. When I tried to ask Him, best I could with a twitch of my branches, I heard His voice in the wind hover over me, just like He did at the waters of the beginning.

“You will help the world if you remain as you are, doing what I made you to do.”

From that moment on, I put all my effort into my own growth.

I thought, maybe I’ll grow and grow and grow, and all creation can rest under my shade, and all will find peace.

My hopes were dashed by the chop of an ax.

Pain jumped up my trunk. I could do nothing, helpless as the ax returned for another swing. And then another. And another. And another.

Pieces chipped away, and I could feel the connection to my roots begin to weaken.

Chop, chop, chop.

I silently cried out to my Maker, and I heard His voice in the wind only one more time.

“Stay strong, be who you were made to be, and you will help the world.”

Forty feet tall, my trunk began to sway, my branches and needles trembling.

Chop, chop, chop.

The men ran away as I fell, only a thread still connected to the bottom of my trunk and my old root system.

In shock and agony, I lay still.

One more swing separated me completely and for the first time since being a pinecone, I was mobile.

They hauled me with some other trees to a peculiar place where soldiers were. I’d seen soldiers like these before walking by. They were of Rome, and they passed a bag of coins to the woodsmen who’d chopped me down.

I was confused. What does a Roman want with a tree, with me and my brothers?

The pain of my felling paled in comparison to the pain that came next, as a group of them meticulously yet roughly chopped, ripped and snapped off all my branches, my needles carpeting the ground.

With a two-person saw, they cut my trunk into four sections, and then they peeled my bark and started using my sections to make rough boards for building.

What could I be built into? I thought. I am in agony and my life is quickly drying out and slipping away, yet what if this is to be my purpose, to be built into something majestic?

I wondered if it were possible that I could be used in the temple. Such work is for the great acacia or the grand cedars of Lebanon, not for a simple pine like me. And my captors would never reinforce the temple…so why am I here?

I don’t know how long it took, but pain ended when the soldier-turned-carpenter stepped away from me, examining me with a smug smile.

What am I?

Some nails connected two beams together, the long one taller than a man, the shorter one as a crossbeam, on top of and perpendicular to the first.

With my remaining pieces, two more were made, and I realized the dark truth of my fate.

I am three crosses, destined to hold three people to suffer, bleed, agonize, and die.

Oh Maker, why is this my fate? I wanted to grow higher than the tallest tree. I wanted to exhale the air to feed the world.

The Maker said nothing.

Late in the morning, I was brought to a Roman hall of judgement, and I could hear some commotion. A few people were not happy that an execution would take place on this holy day, the week of Passover and only hours before the Sabbath would begin. But then a mob gathered around, a group of the same religion but uttering a very different chant.

Inside, a Roman official said he could release one of the men doomed to die. A tradition of the oppressor to placate the occupied.

The man said he would release the King of the Jews, but the mob refused.

He gave them a choice - release a man in whom no wrongdoing can be found, or release a zealot murderer.

Curiously, I could hear the governor say he found no grounds to execute this man, but the crowd screamed a loud chorus, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and the governor relented.

In dread, I waited for the victims who I would hold and usher to death. I waited until finally a line of soldiers emerged from within the hall, leading a broken man, beaten, bloody, torn.

A soldier threw me at the man, and He crumbled to the ground under my weight.

His raw, cut body stained the dirt with blood. One soldier threw me aside while another yanked the man to His feet.

“Carry it! Now!” he yelled, and the man, barely able to stand, somehow held me by my crossbeam, my bottom beam dragging a trail through the dirt road.

The road to the execution site seemed to never end. First the man tried pulling me while He walked backwards, but the mocking soldiers deemed the method too slow, and after a few whips, they forced Him to readjust with my top over his purple shoulder, the rest of me dragging behind Him.

He slowed down outside the city as the pathway led up an incline towards a hill.

The leading soldier whipped Him with an echoing snap, the strands of the whip biting into His flesh with shards of glass embedded into its leather. The sneering soldier yanked with all his might, and the prisoner collapsed under my weight once more.

After a couple minutes of mocking, hitting, and kicking, one soldier screamed to an onlooker.

“You there! Take this man’s cross the rest of the way, or you’ll get one of your own.”

A dark-skinned man, dressed in the weathered but refined garb of a dignified traveler, stepped forward, obedient but frightened.

The prisoner was forced back to His feet, and He croaked out the words “Thank you” to the man who now carried me.

By no longer having to carry me, somehow this broken man walked with an even greater assurance, and energy seemed to return to Him. Though I knew not the words, He even spoke to some of the onlookers.

Finally, after several long minutes, the procession stopped at the top of a hill. The African man was shooed away and I was laid down on the ground.

They pushed the man to the ground and stretched Him over the top of me.

One approached with three long, thick nails and a heavy hammer. One soldier took the first nail positioned it over the man’s right wrist, and the one with the hammer put all his weight and strength into a swing.

Clang!

The prisoner screamed, the nail piercing through Him into me. My wood splintered around the nail’s point of entry, and the man’s blood trickled down into my cracks.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

They finished the first nail and repeated the process with the man’s other wrist.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!

I wanted to cry out along with Him and let His anguish be my own.

How is this my destiny? I wanted to grow and be the tallest tree… I wanted to help the world… yet here I am, the death-bringer of an innocent man.

The soldiers also drove a thick nail through both the man’s feet and into the lower part of my upright beam. Then, one nailed a wooden board to my top, over His head. On the board in three languages, the Romans wrote His charges, and the leader among them read the inscription aloud:

“THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”

Some of the onlookers scoffed at this Jesus, others gloated. A few priests complained that the charge should’ve read “He claimed to be King of the Jews,” but the Romans refused to change the sign.

Two criminals were hung on the other two crosses made from my wood, and they were positioned to this Jesus’ left and right.

His blood continued seeping into my very being, and I held Him as He labored for every breath, pulling Himself up as if underwater, searching for a surface beyond His depth.

Meanwhile, the crowd’s merciless insults hadn’t ceased.

I thought Jesus had been ignoring them, or that the pain was too great for Him to hear them, but then He gently prayed, loud enough for the scoffers to hear, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The sky grew dark around us, and the mocking grew quiet for a moment. At first, both criminals jeered at Jesus, but one stopped His proddings and defended Him, realizing his own wrongs made him far more guilty than this innocent man in middle.

Time moved slowly, every breath an eternity, every splash of fresh blood from His battered, exposed muscles an endless nightmare.

Who is this Jesus, this man bared for the world to see, bleeding and dying and changing my very color?

He cried, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

He struggled for breath, and the darkness grew even darker. Jesus coughed for breath, His body flailing, convulsing.

With a new resolve, He pulled Himself up and screamed, louder than all His other words, “It is finished!”

Then, He hung, no more fight. With His last breath, He uttered one last sentence few could hear.

“Father, into Your hands, I commit My Spirit.”

Jesus stopped moving. His life had left His body for me to carry, and I felt lonely. Lonelier than any other thing in this world, but I also felt proud, and almost sacred, in a grotesque sort of way, for I carried the body of more than a man, but a man who held the very spirit and person of my Maker.

A moment after His death, the ground shook, and I struggled to hold His body in place.

When the ground became steady once more, one of the Roman soldiers stared at the corpse in awe.

He said with a twinkle in his eye, “Surely this was the Son of the God.”

Other soldiers broke the legs of the other two criminals to finish their deaths. To confirm Jesus’ death, another soldier with a spear pierced His side, and a mixture of blood and water poured from the wound and splashed to my base.

Eventually, they removed His body, and I was left alone on the hilltop, saturated with His blood.

My life was gone, but my frame clung to the blood of the one I’d been used to kill.

In my own death, I felt a kinship to this man, for both of us had a destiny of undeserved death. Even though I couldn’t grow to be the tallest tree, I knew I had fulfilled my purpose.

I remained on the hilltop the entire next day, a day of deep sorrow. The next morning, in my base I could feel another earthquake.

The earthquake was far from me, only a mere vibration from my spot on the hillside, but I felt it. Though I knew not how or why, I just knew that this earthquake was significant.

Less than an hour after dawn, I was taken down and stacked onto a cart, and the unknown men rolled me away. I didn’t know my destination until we turned into a deep valley outside the city. Within, I could smell the burning of trash.

Unceremoniously, the men threw me on top of the refuse heap, a place of fire one of the men called “Gehenna.”

I wondered at the significance of my ending, for I’d felt weighed down, not just with the blood of an innocent man, but something else, something invisible but heavy.

But as I burned, resigned to my final fate, my transformation to ashes also produced a lightness.

Whatever it was I’d carried has now ceased to exist, a fact I now celebrate.

Now my ashes have been blowing in the wind, all over the world, free, holding nothing more than the simple story of a tree.