#13 Lessons From The Shade Of A Broom Tree July 2009

Episode 13    July 31, 2009                            Lessons from the Shade of a Broom Tree

Hello out there!  It s been a while since my last literary exercise and like all of you, I can offer several good excuses.  Work, family, health and my mothers passing complicated things to the point where I just crawled into a hole and pulled it shut behind me.  The advantage of hiding out like that is the time to think hard about why such a dark mood engulfed me and the solitude to hear the “gentle whisper” Elijah heard [1 Kings 19:12].  While not a fully developed discussion of this life chapter, becoming an orphan at fifty-four has catalyzed a series of mental explorations.

Direction.  Mom and Dad set a trajectory for your life that survives leaving their nest, continues as long as they are around to share their views with you and may survive till the last memory of them fades. I’d like to think that I launched out on my own in 1977 when Dad died but in reality I have been on the same compass setting that he set for these thirty-two years. As long as mom was alive I could easily see his reflection in her face and hear the echo of his words in hers. Now a dimming recollection of my father is a meager candle lighting the path he trod before me.

Validation.  Parents, family, and friends provide continuous feedback  [not always welcomed] regarding our individual development. You never outgrow this evaluation process as every family reunion uncomfortably demonstrates.  I thought I was an independent man without need of anybody’s approval and especially a parent with whom I had a dysfunctional relationship. Boy, was I wrong!  Everyone in your family tree is important to you whether you acknowledge them or not.  The agony of my mother’s passing is the severance of the fragile thread she provided that connected me to my father and now that too is gone.

Identity    The first twenty-one years of my life I was “Forrest’s boy” then for the last three decades I was “Margaret’s son”. Regardless of how I felt about these labels, they stuck and they have become familiar.  These branches of the Adams and Bailey family trees were grafted to produce myself and my siblings and whether I was proud or ashamed of my ancestors-they are my ancestors.  In some strange way a death severs the limb that connects you to the trees of these two families and that disconnection is as traumatic as the ancestor’s death. 

History    Even though America’s sense of history is naïve and infantile compared to the rest of the world, we hold to it dearly. My folks came across the pond as poor immigrants and migrated west to find land and opportunity like so many others. Truey and Mildred raised eight kids in a chicken coop in Oklahoma in the darkest hours of the Great Depression. Grandma Gladys was a single parent before a TV program made it honorable to be caught in that predicament and not because her values were poor but the miserable excuse for a husband and father, grandpa Charles Lemuel, turned out to be.  This lineage, tradition, heritage, legend or myth is a powerful appeal to one of the two greatest motivations in life-A Sense of Belonging.  Anything the degrades, breaks down or damages this is a threat to your identity

Okay, I scrawl these vignettes in the hope that one of you is encouraged by the subject I explore so before I ruin the great day you were having lets go to the lessons provided for each of these facets by the writers from thousands of years ago.

Direction   God speaks to us as his children when he gives us the compass heading for our walk on this orb. If I lack direction I have either hitched my wagon to the temporal or failed to keep his teaching fresh and relevant.

 Proverbs 3  ¹ My son, do not forget my teaching,  but keep my commands in your heart,  ² for they will prolong your life many years and bring you prosperity. ³ Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.  ⁴Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.  ⁵ Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;  ⁶in all your ways acknowledge him,  and he will make your paths straight.”  
My need to understand is nowhere as near important as my need to acknowledge him.

Validation   There is no greater validation than the verse on those signs we see in the football end zones when the extra point is kicked. 
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,^[f] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  Paul adds his own version of eternal validation: Romans 5:6-8 ⁶You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ‘
Nuff said.

Identity         Thirty years ago I decided that the faith I wanted was not just an extension of my father’s, but my own. The verses that stood out were:
1 Peter 2: ⁹ But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. ¹⁰Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”       
I learned that night that my linage extends far beyond a tiny twig on a branch of the family tree to the very throne of God. I guess I should start acting like it again.

History      We tend to get caught up in denominations, dispensations, post-this and pre-that but Paul connected us to a man known as a friend of God. 
 Galations 3:  ²⁶You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, ²⁷for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.” 
There can be no stronger sense of belonging than the belonging to grandpa Abe through Christ Jesus.

There is nothing unique about the troubles and tests that drove me to the shade of the Elijah’s broom tree [1 Kings 19] because every one of you is assaulted on every side by similar troubles.  What is unique is His longsuffering patience with me while I learn these age-old truths.   Hmmm, smells a little like barbequed oxen …hint:read the story in I Kings 19