Welcome to another in this series of reflections on the natural world.  Like many of you, I’ve been walking in the woods near Clandon golf course. Many times I’ve noticed lots of composite trees. They have many different stems growing out of the ground, with different boughs, different solid bark at the centre and lots of spindly stems round the edges.

The many different stems all compete for light and goodness, so they can thicken and become mature. In this wood, I long to see more big solid trees, with thick trunks but instead, I see lots and lots of spindly trees competing with each other for nourishment.

However, a surprising thing happened to me when I was walking the dogs here recently.

This wood is not a managed wood, by any stretch of the imagination, but surprisingly I found some people clearing a patch of ground and cutting down trees. They were cutting straight through the different trunks of the spindly trees.

This made me think of an analogy with lockdown. All our lives we’ve been growing these composite trunks. Maybe we’ve had a job, a family, taken exercise classes, been part of a club and formed different friendship groups. Lockdown severed all of these composite trunks overnight.

Now I would have preferred it, if the tree fellers had just cut off the outer spindly bits of the trees and allowed the stronger trunks to grow into the trees they could have been, instead of taking everything down to the ground. Yet this is what happened to us in lockdown. It would have been wonderful to have had our lives streamlined, but instead our lives have been cut straight across, like these composite trunks have been.

Now we have a unique opportunity. As we approach a time when restrictions are eased and we start to resume the lives we used to live, we can choose which of the trunks we want to put our efforts and energy into and decide which trunks will get the light and nutrition to grow.

The Bible is full of tenets about how you can live your faith. Look at Micah, all you need to do is ‘to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Consider the greatest commandment of all, ‘to love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength’. Throughout the bible there are tenets offering solid foundations for how to live lives of integrity, love, justice and kindness for others.  In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he described ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  gentleness and self-control, gentleness and self-control.’

So as we move out of lockdown, I encourage you to reflect on the composite parts of your life as it was before. Then work out which ones to invest your energy into and which ones you need to cull. In this way,  the bigger ones can grow and become the tree they were meant to be. You can grow more fully into the you that you are meant to be and the you that God called you to be. You might think you can’t choose, you might think you don’t want to choose, but if you can cull those bits of your life that were detracting from your true purpose, there is still something  that can be done with the surplus that is cut down.

The only way that you can truly be the person you are meant to be is to focus on the things that really give you life, the things that make you unique and the gifts you have been given.

What are the gifts you have been given by God to make a difference in this world? I encourage you to focus on these wonderful talents and to put your strength and energy into them. Then when we come out of lockdown those spindly bits that grew around the outside, can be put to good use elsewhere, but the trunk is going to grow big and solid.

 Remember the wonderful parable in Matthew 13 31-32: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.’

We’ll finish by saying the Lord’s prayer together.

Thank you for joining me in this beautiful wood on this wonderful afternoon and I hope you’ve found something to nourish and nurture you from this reflection.

With blessings

Rev. Rona