Broken Trees and Unbroken Hope: In the Path of Hurricane Helene

Landmarks Lost

For those of us who have been in the path of Hurricane Helene—quite surprisingly, I might add, since the hurricane models even a few hours before landfall had it going about 100-200 miles west of where it went—we have seen a lot of old trees uprooted. Trees that brought shade, fruit, nuts, and directions for generations are gone. They went down with winds and they went down with floods. Some of them took houses and some of them took lives, and with them they took generations and memories that were supposed to last, at least until the next generations and the next memories had taken root and borne fruit themselves.

Most of my family still lives in the North Carolina mountains. Massive oak trees under which my great grandparents built a mountain house are gone. The path of the creek across the street, where my grandmother, my dad, and I grew up playing, will now be drastically different for my own kids. In the pictures that my brother sent me yesterday, a flat-faced boulder where five generations of my family have scratched their names into the moss every summer—and where my wife and I scrawled our names on the day we got engaged—is now just a flat-lying boulder.

Granted, I count my blessings that I say these things as one who did not lose everything and who still has much. My grief is nothing compared to that of many people I’ve passed by and met and befriended for four decades. Our rebuilding will be minimal. It will be sad that my kids won't have the same rocks or the acorns constantly landing on the metal roof, but the silver lining is that there is a new world we can explore together. Something wonderful will grow from this.   

Neighbors Loving Neighbors

That may be little consolation amid great loss, but mountain people are nothing if not resilient. They are also amazing neighbors. Where I live now, a few hours south but still in Helene’s path, I’ve seen that same resilience and neighborliness. I spent Friday morning moving trees and cleaning debris with a huge group of people from my neighborhood, some of whom couldn’t be more diametrically opposed on the various spectrums that seem so important in our usual, comfortable lives. Perhaps you have seen those hilarious AI memes of Donald Trump and Joe Biden hiking, cooking, and knitting together. Well, I essentially saw those playing out in real life dealing with a giant gum tree that was blocking access to our neighborhood.

For the sake of a good segue, I wish I could say that it was a sycamore fig—though gum trees are nearly as obnoxious. There was an ancient rule that sycamore figs had to be a certain distance from towns because animals took shade under them. In ancient Israel, for purposes of clean-ness/unclean-ness, the canopy of a sycamore fig was treated as a tent. Filth on one side of the tree contaminated anyone on the other side.

That’s kind of how we look at people in "different tents" nowadays, too, right? If you’re under one label, then you must be such-and-such: maybe not in terms of clean or unclean, Pharisees or Sadducees, or children of Abraham or not of Abraham, but by whatever labels we want to give each other today. It gives us an excuse to not love our neighbor (cue the Pharisees and Sadducees).

Trees and Life

Like I said, I like the motif of trees in Scripture. In fact, the Bible is bookended by trees... or one tree, if you like. The tree of life is in the middle of the garden at the start, and it’s in the middle of the city at the end. It was taken for granted at the beginning, and Jesus went through a lot to get us back to it... you know, Jesus, who is the “shoot from the stump of Jesse.”

That’s the thing about trees. Even if you cut them, there’s still life in them. If the roots are still good, they’ll just grow another shoot. Granted, the cutting gives a lot of opportunity for disease, pests, etc. to finish the job, but trees can be remarkably resilient. They can have plenty of life even when there’s barely anything left above the ground. If God cuts a tree, it’s not dead; it’s growing something new from the same roots. A shoot from the root can grow to bear much fruit (cue Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle).

That is the good news in John the Baptist’s stark message. God could have raised up children of Abraham from the stones themselves, but he went even lower: a shoot from the roots of faith, not the mere family tree (see Galatians 4, written by a one-time genealogy enthusiast who returned to the true roots). That “shoot,” Jesus, is the connection between the roots of “Love the Lord your God...” and the fruit of “love your neighbor...” And sure, the “love your neighbor” part can get watered down these days with subjective individualism and moralistic therapeutic deism and whatnot, but if those of us who fancy ourselves well-rooted are not clinging to the shoot and bearing the fruit, then it’s all moot.

New Shoots after the Axe

Amidst all this tragedy, the broken trees and the broken communities and the broken lives, my prayer is that we can be like shoots that bear fruit. My prayer is that we can set aside the comfort of our own tents, and that the strength of our roots and goodness of our fruits will be compelling among those who are seeking a new shoot to which they can cling in the storms of life.

We did not ask for this axe and we were not prepared for it, but now that it has come, let those of us who know the enduring goodness of Jesus cling to him and bear good fruit for all to taste.