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As I started this blog, early on Saturday morning, Himself having just left with a metal detector at every corner and his box of sandwiches, I was wondering if the enormous tree that had begun to fall had crashed through my sister's roof in the night! And it was too early to phone. She had been told to sleep in the back until the men with the chainsaws could get there.
The sudden and very heavy snowstorm had brought one of the big trees in her drive down. It was only stopped from crashing through the roof by another smaller tree which it had become propped against. Or possibly more grammatically, against which it had become propped.
I came back from the field service, Saturday lunchtime to find a message from Nute on fb to say that the tree had fallen while the tree surgeons - who had come out asap as hoped, God bless them - were working on it. And, as can happen, it had fallen in an unexpected direction and had crushed the cherry picker! Thank goodness no-one was in it at the time.
Their cherry-picker is a write-off though. I hope hope hope they have a decent insurance policy, as they cannot work without it.
Well, it was a relief to be at the meeting at the Kingdom Hall on Sunday morning, learning and being re-assured about the paradise earth to come - an earth which will be under the loving and perfect control of the Kingdom of God. I am feeling somewhat stressed at the moment as all of sudden it looks like my next, and probably last, book will be published this year and I am trying to liaise and get everything done, without it compromising my witnessing. I am pioneering this month, for the first time ever, and we started the Memorial invitation campaign yesterday.
Another of Ken Reah's lovely paintings of Sheffield trees heads this blog. And, while on the subject of trees, this is a quote from the online Guardian's review of the new David Attenborough series, which started last night:
We see the oldest oak tree in Britain, which has been standing for 1,046 years and so predates the Norman Conquest. Wild Isles makes many claims for these isles’ exceptional nature, from the mighty oaks to the chalk streams that are one of the rarest habitats on Earth. There are only 200 or so of these mineral-rich waters in the world and 85% are in southern England. We see kingfishers, tawny owls and badger cubs. A segment dedicated to how the common lords-and-ladies pollinates is surprisingly intricate and absolutely stunning.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/12/wild-isles-review-david-attenborough-beautiful-tour-of-britain-is-unmissable-tv
Surprisingly intricate? Not really, given the Grandness of the Creator of it all, Jehovah. And it is a paradise-like arrangement in that, rather than being predatory, it benefits both insect and flower. So much of nature is now "red in tooth and claw". But some of it is still probably as kind as it was in Eden.
The Guardian critic rightly calls it unmissable TV, but notes, as the programme itself does, the tragedy of the message, that we are ruining these beautiful wild isles. Which of course made me think of Jehovah's promise that He will "bring to ruin those ruining the earth". Isn't it clearly beyond the power of any human government to put this right?
This review also reminds me how short our lives are now. As the book of Job says: "Man, born of woman, is short-lived and filled with trouble. He comes up like a blossom and then withers away."
That tree has lived for over a thousand years. But we, the damaged children of Adam, only last for a brief season, as the blossom does. It feels so wrong, because we were made to live forever. And Jehovah is holding out that hope, of life forever in the Paradise earth, to every one of us now. Will we accept?
We are all in "the valley of the decision".
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