“when her beams were yanked from the forgotten wood pile”
and it all made sense.
The teacher was reading a picture book to the high school class for devotions, because sometimes the best stories were written for children … children who never grow up.
It was a story I was familiar with, one that I had read many time to our three, one that our family loved.
I am so familiar with the story I could retell it almost word for word. Yet … those words ignited my imagination as though for the first time.
The story is called A Tale of Three Trees by Angela Elwell Hunt. It is written as a folktale about three trees, and the hopes and dreams that they each have for their futures.
One dreams of holding treasure, the second of being a strong sailing ship and the third just dreams of spending her life growing tall and pointing to heaven.
Their dreams are not fulfilled as they had imagined. The one is roughly crafted into a box. The second into a boat. The third was cut into strong timbers, then left on the woodpile.
What happened next is, what Paul Harvey would call “the rest of the story”.
The first tree, crafted into a box, became a feed manger for animals, then, one night he was re-imagined into a bed for a newborn baby.
The second tree, a small fishing boat, full of passengers, encountered a terrible storm, one that surely could have toppled it, until one of those in the boat stood and demanded peace on the waters, and all was still.
The third tree …
“when her beams were yanked from the forgotten wood pile”
she had been left on a wood pile, dreams and all.
All of a sudden I saw the faces of dear people in my life whose dreams have been left, forgotten like beams on a woodpile.
The woman whose husband died too soon. The lady whose dreams of motherhood just keep getting dashed. The one who just wants someone to come home to each night. The one who wants health and happiness for her children. The one who …
Many of us have had seasons when we, too, have felt that our dreams and lives have been forgotten, left for dust to gather and hopes to fade.
Not only does it seem that our dreams are gathering dust, but that they (we) have been forgotten by the one who first placed the dreams within us.
Like the third tree, left on the wood pile, there was and is a plan … just not always in the timing or the one that we imagine.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,”
says the LORD. “
And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.”
Isaiah 55:8
itsawonderfilledlife 