There once was a woman who loved trees. She decided to plant trees, all different varieties, in hopes that it would one day be a forest. This, she knew, would not only bring her much pleasure, but it would also be a way to co-labor with the Creator, bringing God glory, and improving the world. She chose trees that would multiply quickly and would bear fruit and eventually maintain their own growth. The trees grew and multiplied. She also continued planting more and more trees, carefully tending, pruning, harvesting, and admiring each. She loved trees, but the more the trees multiplied, the more difficult it became to maintain them. Pruning that many trees took forever, the fruit would fall down and rot faster than she could harvest it, worms invaded the fruit rendering them spoiled, vines and diseases would overcome some of the trees causing them to die, and bugs and snakes and other dangerous creatures took up residence. Trees that she thought were going to be beautiful ended up growing thick, sharp thorns. Some trees grew too big, choking out and overturning the smaller trees next to them.
She would visit the forest often, but it began to be less and less enjoyable. In fact, the forest started to feel scary. When she would walk among the trees, she got scratched by thorns, came home with ticks, and had dirty shoes and clothes from all the rotting fruit. One day a wind knocked a huge limb off of a tree which damaged the roof of her house and cost a lot to repair. The forest seemed dark and foreboding, ominous and overwhelming. The very thing that had brought her pleasure was causing stress and anxiety. She contemplated moving away from the forest, as it had become a threat.
One day she was complaining to the Lord about the forest. “Lord, this forest is so scary. I don’t like it and I don’t want to live near it anymore. It’s so messy and I can’t maintain it. It feels dangerous and it brings me no joy.” And then she listened.
The Father whispered back, “You no longer see the trees.”
She replied, “I do see them! That’s my point! There are many and some of them are scary and painful.”
He responded, “Look at A tree. Just one.”
So she did. She went out to the forest and walked up to a tree. She focused on the tree, blocking out the rest of the forest in her mind. She noticed tiny, delicate flowers all over the branches. She drew in deeply the sweet scent of the flowers that wafted on the breeze. She observed a beautifully formed bird’s nest in the crook of a branch and heard faint cheeps coming from within and saw the head of the mama bird peering over the side of the nest at her. High in the foliage, she noticed the tiniest of fruit forming in the center of spent blossoms. She saw new growth at the ends of the thin branches and noted the plethora of green variations that clothed the tree in splendor.
“Lord, this tree is really beautiful. And the fruit and flowers it’s bearing indicate an abundant harvest to come.”
“Yes, Child. And there are others like it. Cultivating a forest is not a human-sized task. Cultivating a tree is. You planted this forest because you love trees. Enjoy the trees, one at a time. Leave the forest to me.”
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If you are in ministry, you are probably way ahead of this parable already. We all know the saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” But the Lord spoke to me recently and said, “You can’t see the trees for the forest.” (It’s cool that God speaks to each of us in the language of our heart, using our humanly constructed idioms, parables, phrases, and sarcastic quips, no?)
Ministry is messy, and overwhelming, and full of thorns and rotten fruit and biting creatures. It is wild and unmanageable. And it is beautiful from an ariel view (God’s) and from a one-tree-at-a-time view (ours). But sometimes as a ministry leader you stand back and survey the forest, seeing all the unfixables, and you lose sight of the trees. Each tree. The thriving, growing, individual, fruit-bearing, flowering, flourishing tree.
One of my favorite missionaries works in a difficult place, in an exhaustingly, horrific ministry arena, and has faithfully done so with grace and joy for decades. Once, as I was struggling with the challenges, I asked her, “How do you keep going?” Her reply was, “Focus on the one.” I have passed along that advice dozens of times to discouraged people in ministry and repeated it often to myself and my team.
Don’t lose sight of the trees for the forest.