As I drove down a mountain road last week I noticed this tree. I had to back up and take another look. The tree was just hanging in midair, it seemed. I looked up to see it was caught on other tree limbs, but it didn’t look very stable. I’ve thought a lot about that tree and how I sometimes feel like the bottom has fallen out of my life, too. I’m sure that’s happened to you, as well.
The day you hear the words “cancer,” “there’s been an accident, “six months to live,” or “you’re fired” can make the bottom drop out of your world and leave you hanging. Like that tree, you wonder how long you can hang on. Job, in his torment, cried out, “He tears me down on every side till I am gone; he uproots my hope like a tree (Job 19:10). He also expressed his hope for redemption in Job 19:25. “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.”
Yes, sometimes, the bottom drops out of our little world and it’s difficult to hang on to hope! Without God, we would truly be hopeless. “Thanks to be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57). I discovered that when I can’t hold on any longer, I have to let God hold on to me. He does because He is able. We have to trust Him to hold on as long as it takes. His support is strong and sure.
There is hope that one day we will be like the tree mentioned in Psalm 1. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers” (Psalm 1:3).
Let God hold on to you when you can’t hold on any longer!
What a powerful message! Many thanks.
But I went back to look more carefully at the picture…and then I realized that I had been looking at the wrong tree. You were writing about that “big hanging trunk” and I had been looking at the cross beyond.
PS The photo is another of your gems!
It’s interesting that you saw the cross in the picture. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we saw the cross in all our life situations? It is God’s ultimate intervention in this earthly life. Thank you for pointing out the cross.