The Trees of Heaven, Hell and Earth

How quarrels are opportunities

In the eternal garden where fear and blame are masters no more, a man came upon an old overgrown pepper tree. Now on earth, this man had been a sculptor, and so when he saw the weeping canopy and the bulbous trunk, he thought it looked like a woolly mammoth. This idea pleased him so much that he took his pruning sheers and began snipping the pepper tree to shape it as he had once done to wood and clay on earth.

Before he was finished, another man came along. Now this second man had once been an arborist. And when he saw the trimmed pepper tree, he stopped dead in his tracks. There was no mistaking its form. It was a woolly mammoth in size and texture.

The arborist burst into laughter. All his thirty-odd years of trimming trees—selecting a tree’s central leader, judging the strength of each off-shoot, and waiting for growth to fill in the gaps—had not taught him to trim trees into woolly mammoths. It had never even entered his imagination. And here now this sculptor, with his skills of proportion and scale, was doing just this.

The sculptor too fell into fits of laughter because he saw the humor of it. He saw the thing from the arborist’s eyes, and it delighted him too. They laughed so hard, they cried. Then when they had wiped their eyes, they sat on the soft grass and discussed pruning and sculpting until lunch.

Such are the joys of heaven where trees are enjoyed, and nothing is lost.

Hell is not so.

Upon the shores of the fiery lake where no trees will ever grow, there stood the charred remains of an old oak eternally dead. And against it leaned a lost soul, the bent and shriveled remains of a man. He stood guarding the dead trunk so that no one would touch it. But the black sulfuric clouds often stung his eyes, so he didn’t see another damned soul approach until the theft was complete.

“Hey, there!” the victim shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with that?”

“What? Oh, you mean this,” the interloper replied holding up his stolen goods: some charred remains of the trunk. “It’s nothing. Just some useless charcoal.”

“That useless charcoal is mine, and you can’t have it!”

“Why not? You aren’t doing anything with it.”

“That’s because thieves like you keep stealing it from me.”

“What are you going to do with it? Whiten your rotting teeth?”

“I have much grander plans than anything you could dream up.”

“Try me.”

“You’re obviously not the kind of person who’d understand.”

“Ooh! Watch out! Mr. Ingenious here is going to revolutionize hell! If you’re so smart, you can find some charcoal elsewhere.” Then the interloper seized more of the burnt tree.

“I’ll pound your face into the ground for that!”

“I’d like to see you try.”

And with that, the two men fell upon each other in that dog-eat-dog wasteland where the trees are fought over but never won, and everything is lost.

But there is a third place where trees grow.

On earth where the property lines divide his from hers, two neighbors, a dietician and an Edison employee, were considering the overgrowth of a massive loquat tree that spanned both their backyards.

The Edison employee saw how the branches were touching the power lines and knew that his company would trim back the tree eventually. And although he was no lineman or arborist, he decided to trim back the overgrowth himself. His neighbor the dietician, who also happened to be deathly allergic to gluten, peanuts, and dairy, was shocked to see the results. 

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Keeping the branches away from the wires,” replied the Edison man.

“But the tree! It’s so lopsided now.”

“I can come and trim up your side too if you’d like,” he replied.

“Oh no, please don’t. I like how my side shades the lawn. And what have you done with all the fruit?”

“It’s here. You can have it if you want. It’s not spoiled or anything.”

“Thank you, but I prefer my tree not hacked to pieces.”

“You know, Edison will come sooner or later and cut it back anyway. I'm only saving them work and you their invasive presence.”

“You had no right to touch my tree!”

The Edison employee felt his blood pressure rising and his arguments clouding his vision like a swarm of gnats. He wanted to say, “If you care so much about your tree, why didn’t you trim it yourself?” And, “If you didn’t want it trimmed why did you let the branches overhang my yard? Every year you let the fruit rot on the branches and fall onto my grass and attract rats and flies.”

But his boiling anger prevented him from saying a word, and in the silence, he saw that he wasn’t merely trying to convince his neighbor that he was right, but that he was good. He’d taken her accusations not as an attack on his choices, but as an attack on his character. If he conceded to her point, didn’t that mean that he was not just wrong but bad?

Suddenly, he saw his arguments fall uselessly to the ground. It wasn’t that they were false. They were simply not needed anymore. He'd remembered the truth about his virtue. His righteousness had already been won.

“I am so sorry, my dear lady. I did not think about how the tree would look from your side.”

“Why would you?” the lady replied tartly.

“You are absolutely right,” he replied. “I have been a selfish ass. How can we make this right?” 

His admittance was said truthfully and without false humility because he was under no delusions about himself. However, he also didn't measure his goodness in light of his daily mistakes. Rather he understood himself in light of God’s view of him. And God saw a heart that was clean and right and good and loved. God saw His son's reputation as upholding the human's virtue. Filled with that sort of goodness and love, the Edison employee could relinquish the argument and love in return.

Such is the way on earth, where trees are given up, and eternity is gained.