This shady street has Amazon trucks chugging up and down, dropping tiny packages of single items at people’s homes. Including mine sometimes. For this and many other reasons, climate change has our Ponderosa Pines swaying in massive windstorms every few years rather than every century.

I was talking to a neighbor on Saturday, lingering while on a walk. We were talking about the trees. Having been worried that some of the pines in his front yard would snap in the wind rather than just sway during the next storm, he had invited an arborist to come assess the situation. Two blocks from where we stood talking, a woman was killed by a falling tree in one of these storms a few years ago, and of course we’ve had long power outages, damaged roofs, smashed cars. Insurance companies trying to pretend snapping ponderosas weren’t part of the deal.

The arborist told him something that I’ve been thinking about. He said the trees are fine. Resilient because they stand in a close group. They will sway together, taking the storm as it comes. Bending together, maybe lower than they have before, but not breaking. Defiant. Alive. And not alone.

I don’t have to write the rest. The metaphor of how we can learn from ponderosa relatives at this moment speaks for itself, and if someone reads this they can apply it to their own story. Maybe it will become a theme of the next chapter.

One of the three habits of reconciling leaders is to “renovate institutions into instruments of peace” which stirs up both intimidation and hopefulness in me. Next week I meet with my worship pastor and lead pastor to begin our discussions about our 2024 summer Psalms series, where artists are paired with preachers to share a work of art to coincide with the sermon on each psalm. I plan to suggest a theme this year of “seeing God’s heart for the marginalized through the Psalms”. This could be an opportunity for growth, because our pastors are good at bridging the scripture’s context directly to takeaways for our individual lives, but not so much to the life and plight of our neighbor. Also, to release the artists to wonder about the heartaches of injustice that befall our neighbors, and how we can help our congregation to truly see as well, feels like a beautiful opportunity. 

Yesterday I was thinking about Anthony Ray Hinton’s story. He was accused of a crime he didn’t commit and spent 30 years on death row in Alabama. This morning I read a portion of Psalm 26 which David penned when he himself was being falsely accused: “Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity and have trusted in the Lord without wavering. Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and my mind, for your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness…” Hinton said that when the officers drove up to his mother’s house to arrest him, he was cutting the grass, reciting scriptures in his head in preparation for a sermon he would give in church that evening about trusting God when you’re suffering trials. And the officers shoved him into the car and told him they didn’t care whether he did the crime or not; they needed him to “take one for a brother”. And I imagine that the officers probably went to a church that said nothing about the imago dei in Black people. But  when I contemplate the 30 years that Mr. Hinton lost because he was not recognized as worthy of a fair trial, and I read this psalm, I want to stand next to him and plead with God just like David, “vindicate him, God, for he was walking in his integrity!” 

So this is but one of the many bridges that can be made between the aches of the psalms to the realities of the everyday marginalized. These are the kinds of sermons I’d love to hear, and artwork I’d love to see, that I have to believe could move the needle, albeit just a bit, towards efforts to “renovate institutions into instruments of peace.”

Image source: https://www.pnw.edu/event/one-book-one-community-a-discussion-with-anthony-ray-hinton/