Two trees

“The love of God will protect you from nothing 

even as it unexplainably sustains you in all things.” 

James Finley

There were two tall trees outside Etty’s window. They greeted her at the end of each day when she arrived home. The trees with their proud expansive branches and the jasmine with its delicate white flowers were reliable, friendly companions in her unsteady world. At night the two trees stood guard outside Etty’s bedroom window and the stars “hung like glistening fruit in their heavy branches.” The natural splendor of the scene was an elegant, little light shining against the dominant, growing darkness of the war. 

Then one day Etty arrived home to find that all the limbs had been cut off of the two trees. The trunks stood naked in their roots. Etty’s breath caught in her throat and for a moment she became sentimental and was “deeply sad.” Then suddenly something shifted inside of her. She wrote in her diary, “I suddenly knew that I should love the new landscape, too, love it in my own way. Now the two trees rise up outside my window like imposing, emaciated ascetics [monks], thrusting into the bright sky like two daggers….even in their new shape and setting they are unspeakably beautiful.”

God’s love did not protect Etty from hardship and tragedy. It seemed, however, to do something somehow better. Etty’s constant, sincere, childlike openness to the presence of God’s love helped her to see beauty in all things and all people no matter the circumstances. In this way God’s love sustained Etty day by day even as she was carted off to her death.