A couple of weeks ago a storm blew into Nashville. The sky grew dark against the green hills, the winds picked up, the rains came down, all that stuff. It wasn’t long before someone noticed that a rather large section of a tree outside the school had sheared off, tumbling to the ground and making a pretty big mess.
When all of the debris and old limbs were cleared away and ground up into mulch, you could tell that, though the wind and rain might have helped to tear off the section of the tree, there was something else wrong. Inside, the tree was dying. There’s a cavity inside of this tree I could just about climb in. I don’t know what caused this decay, but the wind and rain had exposed the weakness, and the tree will never be the same.
I walk by this tree every now and then and the shame of its rottenness, what it was once able to hide, is now exposed. A couple of weeks ago you would have said that the tree was large and stately and marvelous, now it’s decaying and ugly.
This got me thinking about humans and specifically those young humans who make it into my classroom. Every now and then I’ll hear about something a student is going through at home or in their personal life, and I’ll look at them and wonder if I can tell something is wrong. Usually when I find out there’s a problem, I’m shocked because I couldn’t tell. I wonder what other students are hiding. How many are going through life with everything seemingly together yet dying on the inside?
Many times a beautiful, flowering, fruit-ripe tree is the epitome of spiritual formation. But is the inside as healthy as the outside? Jesus spoke words along these lines to the pharisees and teachers of the law in Matthew 23:
25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
So, I think I must also think about myself when I see this tree. Am I dying on the inside? What captures my imagination? What do I internalize that’s weakening me? Am I like an unseen rotting tree?
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