I don’t know if I had ever seen a Sycamore tree before we moved to Arkansas. If I did I certainly didn’t notice them. However, the year after we moved here in the fall I started noticing the most beautiful stark white trees that I had ever seen. I didn’t know what they were only that they gleamed in the night and day. I became obsessed with these trees and started noticing them everywhere. It looked as if someone had peeled away the brown bark leaving only the beautiful stark white center pointing to the sky.
God used those trees to show me that I too needed stripping. I had piled so much junk on myself that I was not being used to point to Him. I was terrified of the stripping process because I thought I don’t like pain!! I was waiting for the “other shoe to drop” and the pain to begin. I didn’t trust my loving Heavenly Father to remove all my sin and junk in my life.
I was telling my prayer partner about God needing to strip me and my fear over it and she said that as a child she almost ran out in front of a car and her Mom grabbed her causing her to fall and scrap her knee. Her Mom lovingly doctored her knee and soothed her pain. But the small pain she had was nothing to what could have happened. That is so like my Heavenly Father, He may cause some pain in the process but it is never in order to harm me. He sees the whole picture- the car speeding straight for me. He tenderly wounds me only to lovingly bind up my wounds to make me whole and strip me little by little to get to the stark white center that points the world to Him.
