A tree in a story

Julia ♦ November 27, 2024 ♦ 9 Comments

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel via Unsplash

“Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree…I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.”
— Donald Miller

Today we have more ways to stay connected with others than ever before, but I continue to see headlines and read stories about how isolated many of us feel. Not so long ago, survival demanded that we be in face-to-face contact with other people on a daily basis, but technology has made it possible to do almost anything without speaking to another human. It is undeniably quicker and easier, in many cases, to choose interaction with a device over dealing with an unpredictable person– someone who, like ourselves, will rightly expect a level of courtesy from us that we need not offer a machine.

Little wonder, then, that our sense of life becomes distorted, seen through the fish-eye lens of individual experience that magnifies what is closest to us and confines the wider world to compressed edges at the circular border of our vision. Our view of the world is dominated by the disproportionate appearance of our own immediate circumstances. Meanwhile, what looms large to us may appear to others, if they see it at all, as only constricted details at the periphery of their individual worlds.

This solipsistic existence can work very well for us as long as things are going our way. We relegate and delegate much of what seems unappealing, constructing custom-built lives for ourselves that place us in command and in control– or so it seems until something goes wrong. Then we may find that crucial traits such as patience, humility and compassion have atrophied for lack of use, leaving us frustrated and floundering.

The trials of the past five years, and especially of the past 12 months, have reminded me again and again that the surest cure for despair is to step away from the stage of my own life and get a more accurate sense of the larger reality within which every life is situated. It’s not that my problems are unimportant, and my challenges do not become easier simply because I break their stranglehold on my consciousness. But just as Miller says, the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree. All of us are blessed to be part of that story.

This post was first published seven years ago. As happens so often, it seems more relevant to my life now than ever. The world has become increasingly isolated for me, as so many people communicate (if at all) by electronic means. In response, I have made a concerted effort to prefer the handwritten letter, the phone conversation or the in-person visit to the disconnect of electronic, truncated texts and emails that often get buried in the digital junk mail that never seems to stop coming.

I recently had a real-life demonstration of what people miss when they default to electronic communication. Visiting in person with my Oxford cohort this summer, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more dimensional they became to me when we were face to face, discussing, sharing meals and laughter, and walking through town together. Though I felt I knew them after hours of online discussion over the past year, seeing them in person was an entirely different, and much richer, experience.

But the part of this message most relevant to me now is the message of being a tree in a story about a forest. As I reflect on the almost unbelievable number of catastrophic crises and losses of the past seven years, there is no doubt that, at least in my case, the story of the forest is a much grander tale than the often tragic story of my own struggling little tree. I continue to journey forward in faith that the grander tale I can only imagine will one day be our shared reality, and I will know– perhaps for the first time– the true extent to which my tree was part of that surpassingly magnificent forest.

The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.