Normally they seem to have more leaves than dead wood, but recently I
drove by one huge tree situated by an irrigation ditch that was dead except for
one tuft of life in a single branch.
I wonder if the trees might be symbolic of our Christian walk. In years
past I served in the church nursery, taught children’s Sunday school, and
sponsored teams of junior and senior high Bible Bowlers. At one time those
branches of ministry were thriving and alive, but those days are now over.
Looking at the silhouette of a tree there is a distinct difference
between the live and dead branches, but they are still all attached to the root
of the tree. It reminds me of past ministries interspersed with current service.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----The tree is interestingly similar to the neuron in a brain. Like the tree has a trunk, the neuron has a body. Like the tree draws nutrients in through its roots and passes them through the trunk and branches to form fruit, neurons draw signals in through their dendrites and pass them through the body and axons to the synapses. It is the seemingly infinite networking between neurons through axons of some connecting to dendrites of others which forms the thoughts and activities of the brain. To a single neuron it would seem that the axons of thousands of other neurons contacting its dendrite is soil, and its own array of axons like tree branches full of fruity signals for plucking by thousands of dendrites. They share many signals through commonly used networks, thus your stream of consciousness.
-----People are also similar to these. We are certainly individuated by bodies, like trees are by trunks and neurons by nuclei. Like the neurons, we receive signals from other people through a kind of dendrite system of the five senses which pass through the core of our consciousness to bear fruit in a kind of axon-like system of expressions - gestures, actions, language, etc - unto others‘ senses. Networking does not demand clones for emergent culture and economy. But reality must supply a sort of magnetism guiding sufficient similarity amongst everyone like a contextual cohesion amongst networking neurons composes a coherent, yet relevantly flexible stream of consciousness.
-----Now, you know me. I love quips. Another of my favorites is, “Nothing in Heaven is more real than the Lord God, and nothing on earth is more real than His Holy Word.” In the ministries that would flow from the networking interactions of all His believers, I would expect the messages of the Bible to be a kind of magnetism supplying a certain cohesion amongst all the believers utilized by the Holy Spirit. But a naturally occurring cloud of leaders and preachers and influential people chew God‘s Word into their own perceptions, like disease in a tree, for making a secondary cohesion suffocating what should have been the primary cohesion by honor for God‘s Word.
-----Since there are so many leaders and preachers and influential amongst the millions of Jesus‘ believers, unity of their personal perceptions is downright impossible. The rest of us are wont to be followers of leaders; we wind up with disunity which we euphemistically call denominations and doctrines and church paradigms and programs and ministries and such. I don’t mean they have no place in the network. Nor do I mean their place is not critically important. They do and are. It is just that the critical importance of their place is the wrong place for their personal perceptions.
-----As for each and every person of Jesus’ network, including leaders, his own perception is for his own self, “Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind…So each of us shall give account of himself to God…The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God.” (Rom 14:5b, 12, 22) Would the reality of God’s Word have been noted for the last twenty centuries more than “Who’s your leader and what’s he say,” Sunday School would have been and continued to be Sunday Bible University complete with Bible Bowl teams around the world for twenty centuries. Wow! To bad. So sad. The neuronal network lost its Biblical cohesion to personal perceptions. We have not acted in unity since the first century, and the world has disbelieved the reality that Jesus Christ was sent by the Father (John 17:21.) Lord come quickly, please!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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