"Of Trees and Icicles"

What do they tell you about God?

"In the bleak, mid-winter, Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on Snow,
In the bleak mid-winter, Long ago."

Picture with me trees -- heavy with snow and ice-- with no fruit.  Icicles -- long and sharp -- hanging in the bitter cold.

One Christmas I didn't even want to put up our Christmas tree.  My heart, once full-to-overflowing, was frozen yet beating.  My husband and grown children put up the tree that year without me.  It had to touch the ceiling.  It always had to touch the ceiling!  It needed to reach as high as it possible could.  [God had  thought about trees  before He created the earth's foundation, and one tree reached all the way to Heaven!  At least ours could touch the ceiling!]

There was once a couple who played a game.  No score was kept.  There was only one rule:  One would name an object and the other person, interpreting the object, had to explain what aspect of God's "being" was shown:   Anything!   A moss-swaddled stump of cedar, or voluminous cloud formations, or forbidding granite mountains.  Call it a "Divine Game." 

This couple had read Romans 1:20, "Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- His eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what he has made!"  So, they made up this game.

Playing it will open our eyes to see, not God in our stories, but our stories in God's story! 

Here goes!  What aspect of God's being is shown in Icicles?  Icicles are made as water drips off trees or roofs, and freezes in space.  They grow long when warm light beams strike it.  The icicle starts to melt getting longer and longer.  Darkness comes and it freezes solid.  The sun rises and it weeps, drop after drop.  The next day it weeps even more as the sun beams down on it.  It becomes longer and sharper.  When enough light comes into it, its form totally changes.  It breaks.  Frozen tears melt into a running stream.  Bleak winter yields to spring!

God was "frozen" in our time for 33 years and 9 months, in a human form.  But his heart melted.  It wept.  It became a river of Life.  Our Lord told the Samaritan woman at the well that if she drank His kind of water she would never thirst again!  All her life she had eaten fruit from the tree of good and evil.  Eternal Life had hung on another tree that reached all the way to Heaven, frozen in earth's space and time with bitterness and cold.   Love blazed Light and all of hell could not hold it back.  "Drink slowly.  Drink deeply," the River sings.  He holds your cup.  And out of it will flow rivers of living water to someone you touch with your warm love.