A few years ago my brother, mom and I went to the Grand Canyon. As we hiked along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, I was captivated by the twisted trees. I asked my brother and mom what causes this, and my mom quickly said, “the winds.”
Gazing upon their nakedness of fallen bark, the tree is left exposed. Taking in their cracks, crevices, and gnarled joints, it’s as if you could feel and hear the pains they endured as they rest in their current state. And still, they produce life. From their struggles, tender, delicate new growth blossoms, wafting freshness into the air.
Anyone resonating yet? I know I do. We live in a world filled with gusting winds of opinions, piercing breezes of judgments, and exposing blows of polarization. Enduring these forces—over and over—leaves us twisted, aching, and exhausted. As we face these challenges within ourselves, our communities, and our neighbors, we grow hardened and distant, which is antithetical to God’s call that we may love and reconcile with one another.
As Edgardo Colón-Emeric suggests, in his incredible book, *The People Called Metodista*, “The call of reconciliation requires abandoning postures of moral superiority that blind us to our own culpability, acting as ‘the ones who feel pure and clean, the ones who think that they have the right to present others as the cause of the injustices and are not capable of looking, working, and seeing that they too have contributed to the chaos.’”
Like the tree, which still bears life despite being twisted, we, unlike the tree, have the ability to untwist our minds and hearts from the constricted views we live within. We have the opportunity, like the tree, to bear life—and life abundantly—bringing forth an aroma of hope, love, welcome, reconciliation, equity, and justice.
Paul reminds us in Romans 12:2, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Untwist, my friends, untwist.