Trees and Consequences

by Greg Kogler

I live in a rural area. Our town has a population of around two-hundred people. We are surrounded by farms, pastures, cattle, and lots and lots of trees. The rolling hills and open space display a wide and beautiful variety of trees and entering the full spring season brings the anticipation of new leaves and beautiful flowers as living things revive from their naked winter display.

I love trees. Literally. I can look at them for hours on end and am always amazed at the variations in appearance, color, texture, dimension, and the sizes from very small to unbelievably large. To me, they are beautiful, and I thank God for creating them.

One of my favorite sounds is wind moving through the pine trees, and as much as I enjoy looking at trees, I also enjoy closing my eyes while the wind is blowing and just listening to one of the most relaxing sounds you can imagine. Good for me, my area is home to different varieties of pine, so I get the daily experience of both looking at and listening to them. But like all trees, these tall and graceful figures eventually succumb to nature and die. The cause of the tree’s death is often varied, and once the tree is no longer living, the formerly majestic and beautiful creation quickly becomes a dangerous liability.

The process of a tree dying can be slow, and there are signs along the way which show the progression from a living thing to dead. While this process continues the tree can remain something to be enjoyed, but the reality is each day brings with it new hazards that are natural consequences of this transition. When you live around and under trees these consequences need to be understood, accepted, and managed. Or else.

On my property were two very large and very dead pine trees. Each tree had a twenty-eight-to-thirty-inch diameter trunk and stood about seventy feet high. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with tree measuring, this means the circumference of each tree near the base was about seven feet. Big trees. Fortunately, they were away from the home and in a place presenting a low risk to anyone. I suppose they could have been left to fall naturally, but we spend enough time in the woods behind our house to make the idea of one of these trees coming down at an unplanned moment a bit scary and I wasn’t willing to take the chance.

So, what to do? The trees needed to come down. Hmmm….what were my options. I have lots of lifetime experience with a chainsaw doing all manner of work. I’d guess about a thousand hours of time running these machines which does include cutting down trees, but I have very little experience cutting down large trees. As a matter of fact, I have zero experience cutting down large trees. And cutting down large, dead trees is an entirely different set of considerations. The reality is you can lose your life if you screw this up. Technically, I was fully in the category of not qualified for the job.

This moment of objectively acknowledging the truth of the situation prompted me to assess how to bring the trees down without being the cause of some minor (or major) disaster. Regardless of the philosophical question about a tree and noise in the forest, I can assure you when an intact large tree comes to the ground it is loud, messy, intimidating, and literally shakes the ground on impact. Side note, it also puts me in awe of the God who created them.

After considering a list of options I decided to tackle the project on my own. Now, if you’re sitting there wondering why I didn’t, “just hire someone,” well, that is way easier said than done where we live. Trust me, I’d have been happy to have the choice and enjoy watching the show. Instead, I did a bunch of homework and studied, practiced certain techniques on smaller and then larger dead trees, purchased some additional equipment, and repeatedly thought through and planned for how the felling process would happen and how to mitigate unnecessary risk during the process. This process took weeks to accomplish.

Ultimately both trees were brought down in a controlled fashion. No one was hurt, nothing was broken, and there is plenty of wood on the ground to use for any number of upcoming projects or bonfires on our cool spring evenings. The best part – there are lots and lots of mature, healthy trees to keep enjoying and plenty of new young trees sprouting up waiting to assume dominance in the forest.

Going through this whole process made me pause one afternoon as I realized the potential and harsh consequences of the choice I’d made. It wasn’t a lose-lose awareness, it was a moment to acknowledge doing the right thing could still have an unpleasant outcome. The more I thought about it the more I realized the parallel between the potential consequences of cutting down two pine trees and the current cultural “conversation” surrounding outcomes and consequences.

Our current social debate on outcomes uses words like justice, consequences, judgment, and equity. These words get thrown around with mind-boggling frequency and cover every topic from our legal system to food distribution to education to sports and even toy selections at your local retailer. These words are used in volume, often with little accurate context, in a way most of us don’t recognize to twist a conversation or influence others toward a desired, but difficult to immediately understand outcome. Drives me nuts.

The interesting thing about consequences though (and pine trees), regardless of what caressed language is used to make someone feel good when discussing the topic, the results of certain choices or lack of choices still occur. And even when it seems there is a delay between the choice and an immediate outcome, life demonstrates to all of us the connected consequence arrives at some point. It’s kinda’ like the moment when real life shows up and thumps idealism on the head. We all know it’s going to happen even if we don’t know when. It’s the equivalent of the dead, one-hundred-pound branch, falling from the top of the pine tree and smacking you on the head. Helmet or not, it’s going to hurt (or worse).

As Christians we follow a God of consequences, and we see them through a limited perspective wanting to define them as good or bad. We also follow a God who cannot allow final outcomes contradictory to the purity and perfection of His character. We follow a God who allows painful consequences into our lives because He loves us enough to desire our salvation and sanctification over our satisfaction and pleasure. And we follow a God who saw the consequence of not sacrificing His only Son on our behalf and chose to inflict an undeserved judgment on Jesus so that every one of us who calls Him Lord could avoid the justice we absolutely deserve. Amazing.

Yet, how many of us Christ followers enjoy the benefit of this truth and still participate in the cultural conversation in a manner that seems to support the avoidance of natural consequences or the imposition of unneeded and unduly harsh ones? And regardless of where we see ourselves in the conversation, do we step away from the truth of God’s word, His descriptions of justice, and His example of how consequences are brought forth, to twist the truth and reality of God’s principles into idealized talking points that make us feel better and help us score points with our “people?”

I follow Jesus. I love Him with my whole heart. I also spent 34 years in government service working in dense urban areas and seeing experiences through the filter of scripture. The work often involved high potential and actual risk, and the consequences of foolish decisions, ignoring reality, or being over-confident were harsh. At times, people died. People in my profession died and others died. Every single time you could look at the circumstances and see where simple decisions and seemingly random moments merged and developed into awful outcomes. Consequences. Some deserved, and many not. And yes, they are remembered. As C.S. Lewis said, “Experience is the most brutal of teachers, but you learn, my God, do you learn.”

So, when I think about the concept of consequences and outcomes there is a lot of foundation for understanding what happens when reality steps in and crushes good intentions and kind thoughts or gives a terminal lesson regarding ignorance or foolishness. This same experience also causes me to wonder. When listening to conversations amongst other believers wanting to take sides in our current cultural divide there seems to only be a choice between two extremes: removing all adverse consequences for people who made decisions exposing themselves or others to harsh outcomes or imposing adverse and sometimes excessive consequences on individuals because it suits a political construct. You can choose between that set of unpleasant options or run with the next option set that everyone should only get what they deserve (who decides though?), and no one is responsible to help anyone else when they clearly have the means and resources to benevolently assume the responsibility. After all, it’s not their “job.”

Let’s be real, neither position is consistent with either the character or example of the God we serve and trying to select the “correct” option tends to ignore the idea of God’s sovereignty, His desire that every single person should come to know Him, and what our role as His followers may be in the process. After all, sometimes the very tragic and harsh outcomes people experience puts them on their knees and brings them to a place of deep and meaningful relationship with the Lord. And these individuals, as painful as their experience was and still may be, often wind-up having life-altering, eternity lasting impacts in the lives of other people they are uniquely positioned to have influence with. Super cool right? How many of you can remember a painful or tragic experience that has impacted your life in such a way that, even if you could, you wouldn’t go back and change it? I can.

I guess the point of all of this is to encourage us as Christ followers to remind ourselves of how our God works. He is a God of perfect justice and consequences. He is also a God of amazing grace and mercy and forgiveness and of hope and redemption. Perhaps our role in the current cultural debate (argument?) over which is the correct way to find “justice” is to remember His example. He is not a God of either-or thinking. He is not relegated to a choice, He creates choices. He is a God who perfectly understands the “and” between positions and sees everything though a limitless perspective while existing outside His created constraints of time and natural law. He uses His wisdom to save us from our ourselves (even when it hurts) and shows mercy and tenderness in moments where it is entirely undeserved.

At the end though, He will render judgment based on how we exercised the free will He created us with. Good or bad, we will spend an eternity reaping the consequences of a decision to accept Him as our Savior or walking away from this amazing gift. We know this is true. So why don’t we spend more time focusing on the eternal consequences for the people in our culture, neighborhoods, schools who don’t yet know Him?

Yes, there is a real time and place to participate in the public forum and political process (and we absolutely should!) but that isn’t the primary method we will use to make the greatest impact in the lives of non-believers, those we say we love or those who drive us crazy. We can either choose to “love” them so much we never share Christ’s message of salvation because we don’t want to offend, or we can choose to take a position that says they will only get what they deserve and sit back and perhaps ignore any opportunity to share Christ with them. Either way has a tragic eternal consequence for them and likely some collateral unpleasant ones for us.

Consequences have happened and will happen to all of us. We can ignore that reality, incessantly worry about it, or we can be honest about where we stand in any process with potentially difficult and permanent outcomes and do what needs to be done to alter the outcome or mitigate unnecessary risk. And yes, praying like crazy is a legitimate mitigation measure. One of my personal favorites by the way. If we choose the third option, let’s combine that approach with a willing desire to help others avoid the truly horrific consequence of not knowing and accepting Jesus as their Savior. Being there to help another step into a life committed to Christ will be incredible and watching their life change as they grow in their walk with the Lord will bring any of us joy. It will make our Dad smile too. Why wouldn’t we want that?

And who knows, maybe those we walked with up to the moment they accepted Christ will have a moment of awe when they understand the God they now serve created the universe, created them, and created pine trees. And then we can spend some time talking amongst ourselves about how magnificent God is and encourage each other, regardless of or our differing cultural or political views, and together look forward to being home with Him in a place of perfection…and pine trees?