We have two new olive trees planted.
One to remember an excellent person who died full of years worthy of honor and another to recollect a youngling who died a boy. We will meet, but we will miss them in different ways.
A person who died full of good works at the end of a natural lifespan leaves us with the great gifts of a well spent life, yet lonely. We know the truth of the severe mercy of death: nobody would go on forever as life is this side of God’s final glorification of creation. We know all too well that all our lives are bounded in time, but that does not mean we do not miss our loved ones. We do, because ultimately humans were not designed to lose each other in death. Each of us has eternity in our hearts and we long to see with certainty what we now grasp by faith. This is a reasonable, substantial hope that is not yet fully manifest, so we long for the Kingdom that is coming.
Another soul was cut off early in his days. Why? If God is good, then there is an answer. However, the full answer, beyond the goodness of God, is impossible to us. Partly the reasons will deal with the brokenness of the world. People keep making choices, many of them bad, and the implications of these choices on the environment grow and increase disease. We also live with the implications of people long gone as their choices continue to have repercussions. God knows the future and so God also knows what is best, what would be our heart’s true desire, if we knew all there was to know about the future. God also respects the privacy of each individual soul and does not reveal to us any other person’s full story. God reveals His love toward us and when He came in the flesh, He stood by the tomb of His dead friend and wept.
God knows our pain.
None of this is to say the death in itself is anything, but bad. We mourn, deeply, fully, with all the agony that seeing, for a moment, just some of the implications of the broken world. All is interconnected and God works to make the outcome, slowly, over eternity, best. No pain will be for nothing. No agony is forgotten. No loss is forever. All that is good and beautiful truly finds restoration. There will be an eternity of healing, hope, and health for all God’s children.
The truth, this blessed hope, is often feeble in the face of loneliness or grief. Sometimes we make some outer sign, a symbol, of our inner hope. My Nana described her growing family as a garden and each child, and then grandchild, was given a place there. I was, I think, a jonquil. Most of that garden, including the soul that planted it, is not in the City Foursquare that will someday come lowering down. Nana saw that event in a vision too. Gardens require immediate maintenance to be sustained.
We have a garden at the School and College, but a garden is the work of the living symbolizing the work of Paradise. Instead, a tree is, a different kind of symbol. A tree is life that sustains itself against weather and time. Trees, which grow much longer than we live, and require much less daily work, endure. They are life to us, purifying the air we breath. While they are not immortal, though they are some of the most long lived. The great live oaks, some well over a hundred years old, that dot our campus were placed there long before I was born and will be there long after I am gone.
Our own School and College community have taken to planting on olive tree as a sign and memorial of life. Why? In the imagery of Revelation, the olive tree will bloom when Messiah comes again. The olive tree is alive, gives food, and oil. The silvery leaves are beautiful and underneath a tree there is shade from the hot sun of Houston. Our little grove is getting larger, but then so is our eternal community.
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