Hauling Heavy

My dad made it home for a few minutes when his phone rang.  Given the situation we had all lived through over the last 6 days I thought it was the hospital, a doctor, or some other medical facility.  We had just endured a roller coaster experience as my dad went through internal bleeding, heart stoppage, and numerous procedures to patch his body back together.  Miracles occurred and he eventually was discharged and we brought him home for the next phase of life, which is a tough road of rehabilitation, rest, and restoration.  And phone calls.

This phone call was not a doctor but rather the tree service my Dad had talked to a few weeks ago.  Their schedule just opened up and they moved my parents’ job to the front of the list.  Taking trees down was at the bottom of my Dad’s list with his conditions but we decided I would be the substitute “Bill Beck” and hang around while 3 Walnut trees were removed.  He could continue to rest and recover among the sounds of chainsaws and chippers!

So at the end of a very heavy, very emotional week, and on my Dad’s first day home from the hospital I found myself watching limbs fall and trunks drop in the yard.  I jumped in and cut up some branches that I could add to my firewood pile.  But the big stuff…that seemed far too nice to just cut up and burn.  I decided to keep those intact and haul them off to a sawmill.

There are several sawmills reasonably close by but the one that was open on a Friday afternoon was 10 miles away.   I had other errands to run that were somewhat close to the mill so I found myself dragging my dead trees around the countryside, crossing things off my to-do list in an effort to be productive while hauling heavy.    Eventually I swung into the sawmill just before closing time.

I had several thousand pounds of dead trees in my trailer and for an afternoon all it did was drain my gas tank and slow my travels down.  But at a sawmill these dead trees have some value.  And my hope was that their value meant getting them off my trailer!   My new friend that runs the mill came out from behind stacks of cut lumber with a yard stick and immediately started measuring the logs, eyeing them up, and eventually came to a number of their value and worth.  I don’t know what all he calculated in his mind but each log was scrutinized and studied before he gave me a number.  More importantly he said he would take them. 

I had no real need for 5 logs.  I specifically came to this place (albeit in a roundabout way) to get rid of them. They had value in the hands of the right person but that was not me.  I carried them for a bit but I was also happy to see them go.  I backed my truck and trailer next to the loader that would pluck the logs off one by one.  

The unloading zone looked a bit like a wasteland.  It was dirty.  Gritty.  Tree bark covered the ground.  It looked like the kind of place where dead trees were unloaded but not without a fight.  I didn’t want to get a flat tire running over parts of dead trees. 

The loader grabbed the logs one by one and tossed them in a pile off to the side of my trailer.  It was almost comical how easy the grapple attachment would squeeze something that was hundreds of pounds and toss it like a toothpick.  But as the machine flicked the logs off the trailer I stood in awe of the giant stack of logs looming next to my truck.  It was monstrous.  It was an enormous stack of dead trees that were all unloaded from countless trucks and trailers.  By my quick count I thought there were 600 former trees just stacked up, ready to be sawed and repurposed.  It was quite a site because I knew there was no way any man stacked those logs.  That loader took all the logs and neatly stacked them high and long.

And in that moment I could probably place a worry, a concern, or a “what’s wrong” on each of those dead trees.  My family had endured a lot in the last week.  In the last year.  In the last few years.  The stack of dead trees could easily be my stack of ughs.  Life was heavy.  Life was hard.  Life’s difficulties were numerous.  It would be easy to make a stack of sorrows that mimicked the size and scope of that log pile. 

But just that quick I heard “give it to me”.  Just like I heard the man at the sawmill tell me he would take the logs on my trailer; All I had to do let him unload them.  Give it to HIM.  All of it.  I don’t need to hold all of the ughs and try to manhandle them in a stack of sorrys myself.  We aren’t designed to do that.  We have an invitation to back up next to do God’s loader and let him take the weight.  It’s where grace and grit intersect.   I don’t have to carry this by myself. 

I stood and stared at the stack of logs and I knew that God used some dead trees in what seemed like bad timing to show me that He knows the pain of the moment.  The pain of the season.  And he’s offering to take it all.  He’ll take it all and stack it.  He’ll stack it like the loader that grabbed those hundreds of logs off of the many trucks that backed into the grit and grime to have their loads lightened.  And someday I will stand in awe at the adversity that God has guided me though.  Not by my own strength, but by my willingness to back up and let Him unload my heavy, heavy, weight.  He will do something with me and my circumstances.  They won’t define me when I let them go.   My faith is proportional to the stack of stuff I hand over to God. 

Give it to me He says…