Bark Ribbons

The strips of bark hung like ribbons playing in the wind off the branches overhead. Such an old tree, must have stood there for generations, seen children grow by her roots, and then their children. Yet the branches overhead look young, the bark stripping back the old revealing new looking, smooth limbs.

She ponders the stripping back. It’s revealing, raw, takes vulnerability. It takes putting aside pride and perfectionism. This last year has been a stripping back year, a revealing year of where she’d placed her identity – in the people around her, in her friendships, her role, her work, even the place where she lived. That is all gone. So, what is she left with?

She lifts her eyes once more to those branches, the bark that had once clothed the branches hanging down, lifeless but for the breeze. Her eyes travel along the branches to the trunk. Oh, she sees now. For the branches to be made fresh and new, they need to be attached to the source of all things new. An ancient life source with roots that go way down to the beginning of time and place and being. Attached to that trunk, she has everything she needs and knows who she is. Firmly rooted, well nourished, she need not fear the stripping back.

As the wind blows the bark ribbons, she looks again at those fresh, new looking branches and feels a shift in her being. She’s ready for the new now. Although the old fit well, was comfortable and so very hard to let go of, she feels an excited expectation of what the new might bring. She smiles. The youth in her shining through the weight of the last year. ‘You Lord are my strength and my defence; you have become my salvation. You are my God, and I will praise you, my father’s God, and I will exalt you.’ Exodus 15:2 (paraphrase mine).

For reflection: Is God stripping something away from you today? Perhaps a belief about yourself, or something that you’d based your identity on? Are you willing for the old to be stripped off and something new to begin?