So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away - look, what is new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17)
God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, and he spoke to me through a manzanita bush. No fire or words came out. Nevertheless, Yahweh imparted truth through a shrub in California’s Sierra foothills.
Some past calamity, perhaps a drought, had starved the branches into gray skeletons, and yet, life sprang from the heartwood. Mahogany-red growth pushed its way around the dry bones. Each branch bore the two faces of a harlequin—ashen death on one side, and deep red life running parallel on the backside.
The bush was all the more wondrous because it held death in juxtaposition with life. God honored this heroic plant by giving it the ultimate color treatment—sage-green leaves set against cinnabar branches, and pink flowers dangling like Chinese lanterns.
That bush was a picture of my life. I ran my fingertips over the twists in the velvety trunk and expected a nature trail placard with my name on it. My past is a petrified record of reaching for temporal increase, resulting in gray death. Jesus touched my heartwood, and new life grew around the ruins of my sin. Like the bush, I became an amalgamation of death and life sharing the same body.
I envy the infant that dies before he learns wickedness from this world. He moves from creation to paradise with no evil thought tainting his soul. But the manzanita tells me that life overcoming death is more beautiful than untested life alone. God’s will for me, therefore, is that I should be made out of good overcoming the evil in me. It’s a painful, and at the same time, glorious fate.
Prayer: God who speaks into my life, let the new overtake the old.