The Baby Tree

When my wife and I found out we had miscarried, we deeply felt the loss, even though she was only six weeks pregnant and our child was a wee little thing. We decided to buy a tree as a memorial for our child. We wrote notes to it and put them in a plastic bag and put it in the hole we dug for the tree. We planted it in our front yard and we call it The Baby Tree.

It's an Eastern Redbud. In the spring, it has a lot of really pretty blossoms on it, but it wasn't always so. It was very skinny when we first got it and I had to put a tree staking kit around it to support it. When the weather would be stormy and windy the tree would flop all over the place. A year after I planted it we had a very strong thunderstorm and the tree trunk broke right above where the support ring for the tree staking kit was. It was hanging by a small sliver of bark so I got a saw and cut it off the rest of the way.

We were afraid it would die so we called a nursery and asked them about it. They said it would start growing branches right beneath where it broke. Sure enough, about a month later, I saw some branches growing right under where the trunk broke. It's now eight years later and the trunk has turned into a thick, strong base for all the branches that have grown from it. The tree has a very full canopy and in the spring it has an abundance of redbuds.

When I think of that tree, I think about how we each reach a breaking point in our lives. With God's help we can turn what's left from those breaking points into a firm foundation God can use for all the fruit our lives will produce.

Reaching a breaking point isn't bad. It can strip away all the unnecessary things we've let get into our lives that take our focus off of God. All the things we've been doing to make ourselves into what we think we need to be. God strips all that away to make us into what He wants us to be. The end result is much more glorious than anything our feeble efforts could've accomplished.

When we had our miscarriage, we were broken. We wanted a child so bad but we realized God was taking us in a different direction. We trusted Him completely. We became foster parents and had many more children in our home and had the privilege of adopting one of them. When it's stormy and windy and I feel like at my end, I know good things are on the way.