I may have been the only healthy 15-year-old in all of Northeast Mississippi to be fascinated by trees. It was J.R.R. Tolkien’s fault. He turned my backyard into an enchanted forest and regular old cedar trees into bards that twisted up from the dirt, telling me tales of rain, and growth, and sunlight. I had spent so much time in Lothlorien and Rivendell, the hidden domiciles of Elves, that they followed me everywhere I went like shadows. They still haunt me today as I sit at my home office desk, my fingers dancing over plastic letters, listening to the hum of a distant lawnmower and my wife washing dishes in the kitchen.
The world is a story, and we are privileged to live among its pages, breathing in its old book smell with every taken-for-granted breath. Sadly, many of our race have been blinded to the glory of our beautiful story-world. They look at the cedars and confidently label them trees, as if to express an aspect of infinite divine creativity in a single syllable – they soak in nutrients from the topsoil, release a quantity of oxygen and absorb some amount of carbon dioxide, creating food from the sunlight by a process known as photosynthesis. And the sun, they pompously explain as if to hide themselves from our storytelling God, is just some gasses and energy, driven by mathematical principles on the long and shiny road to one day burning out and leaving us all in the dark and cold. But the world is a story, God’s story, whether they give it permission to be or not.
I sat on a homemade bench, a plank roughly nailed between two patient and obliging logs, swinging my restless feet and startling some ants as they marched along their scouting trail. The cedars were creaking and groaning to each other in the wind, complaining about ingrown twigs, oddly shaped knots, and the latest battles between the king mockingbird and the squirrel clans. From where I sat I could hear the creek parading through his bed, haughtily bragging about his travels to the wise, deep-throated frogs. They watched him fluidly tripping over pebbles, only grunting their disapproval every now and then. It was a lazy Saturday afternoon, and I was looking for the story.
It was a story I had to train my eyes to see. And every time I looked, after a minute or two, I would find it. I would see the story develop all around me, the plot thickening with each passing moment. At the bidding of a whispered word – not mine, God’s – the sun’s rays would alight upon an outstretched cedar bough, bearing gifts from a realm for which Adam’s children are unfit to explore. At that same moment, the tree was eagerly drawing goodness from the earth, like a child with a milkshake. As I watched, by breath entered and exited my lungs, and the tree took that too, trading my breath for its breath. We sat side by side bathing in the foreign light, our toes digging into the dirt, just breathing together and listening for “the thunder of His voice, and the rumbling that comes from His mouth” (Job 37:2).
On cool autumn evenings my dad would take me, my brother, and the big red telescope out into the front yard to look at the stars. With one hand holding a steaming mug of his favorite coffee, Dad would helpfully point out clusters of distant orbs of glory, majesty, and stellar awe, around which danced innumerable worlds. Their names? M 92, M 68, and so on. I always felt these names were travesties. Why does the world entrust the naming of such glories to mathematically minded specialists when it is obviously the job for fairy-tale writers? Why name the expanse above us “sky” when it is obviously “Heaven,” and “space” when it should be “Deep Heaven?”
God made the rocks, the trees, the earth, the stars, and me – and only when I saw that could I understand the story our world is. In the beginning was the Word, and when that Word told a story, forms and meaning leapt onto the pages. And all the sons of God shouted for joy. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:1-4).
As I sat by my friend the cedar, it was not just a tree to me. As I gazed through mirrors at distant worlds that sang forth the tale of God’s glory, they were not just balls of burning gas, no more than I am just a wad of sinew mixed with water and lumps of calcified matter we call bones. The trees, the dirt, the sun, the stars, the angels – we are all words God chose to speak. We all came from the same genesis, the mind of God, and we are all heading for the same end, the glory of God. Whether it took a billion years to shake us into shape by arcane and scientific methods, or only a week for us to pop into existence one after the other, we have a royal pedigree. Our exile from Eden does not take away our proud heritage.
The world is a story. In my daydreams, I take a quill and dip it into our story-world and draw it across the pages of my imagination. I take what I learned from the tree-creature in the enchanted forest as it ate sunlight and earth, and with the same God-forged pattern I feebly weave worlds of my own and populate them with dragons and knights to slay them.
Why have we felt the urge to create stories of our own since we first appeared on the planet? For the same reason I watched in reverence as the shaggy cedar feasted upon a shedding star.
Hope.
We were created by a storytelling God, and His story of hope being woven before my eyes, grasping onto goodness and grace, the earnest fore-payment of the Prince’s return and the exiles’ reinstatement.
