There was a magnolia tree by a white church on a hill. It was a beautiful tree—tall and green and blooming every year with those massive flowers, so sweet to smell. More than this, it was a hospitable tree. Its branches, always sturdy, started low enough to the ground that even small children could climb up onto the lowest ones.
The less adventurous kids might stay there, sitting with a friend or two, dangling their legs just above the ground. But others did not stop climbing. From those lower branches, they could keep going, up, up, up, to the tippy top of the tree. The top branches would sway a little but still held firm, kindly supporting the brave children who reached them. The tree’s thick leaves and blooming flowers offered the perfect secret fort: An onlooker could barely tell, unless looking closely—or hearing the giggles—that children were up in this tree, growing alongside it, taller by the day.
Throughout Scripture, our story has often been intertwined with trees. Adam and Eve dutifully cared for trees as Eden’s stewards. What would their work have looked like in a garden so blessed that it required no hard labor resembling agriculture after the Fall? Perhaps gentle care was still needed even then. Occasional pruning, maybe, picking fruit in season, or raking leaves to keep paths clear for walking.
We don’t know for certain the nature of their work, but here’s what we do know: It was in the presence of these trees, a cloud of green whispering witnesses, that they met God face to face. And it was under those leaves that a horrible tragedy involving a specific tree resulted in their expulsion.
Ever since, people have cultivated trees with much labor: fruit trees for food, others for wood and shade and other practical uses, and some trees mainly for their beauty. Appreciating beauty is inherent in our nature as image bearers of God. He too, after all, delights in the beauty of his handiwork.
Delight, in fact, is the word that first comes to mind as I think of that magnolia tree by the church on the hill. Every Sunday, as soon as services ended, children would clamber into this tree, ever upward, while parents drank coffee and chatted with each other.
This was the tree that my daughter once climbed at age 3 without my knowing, her first and unexpected excursion of the sort. Once high up in the tree, she peered at the ground and realized she did not know how to come back down. As I scoured the church grounds in circles searching for her, another mom walked past the tree and heard my daughter weeping. She helped her back down to good solid soil, safe and sound.
This was the tree that my eldest son climbed more and more cautiously as he grew older, eventually no longer venturing past the middle portion, wisely judging that it might not hold his growing body. This was the tree too that welcomed my middle son, the most cautious of my children, who never went past the lowest branch but kept coming back to spend time under the leaves.
Whenever we’ve talked about the story of Zacchaeus at home, we remember this tree. Zacchaeus didn’t climb a magnolia, of course (Luke 19:4), but it was a tree much like this one, a good climbing tree, that held the “wee little man” who wanted nothing more than to see the Lord more clearly.
Two and a half years have passed since we moved away from Georgia, from where this tree grows beside the church we called home for seven years. I still cannot bring myself to unsubscribe from that church’s email list. I still read the weekly updates. And that was how I learned recently that, because of continued growth in membership, the church must undergo another renovation. As part of this renovation, the magnolia tree will come down.
Why do I feel this pang of sadness for a tree now 660 miles removed from my front door? Perhaps because my love for that tree is tightly bound up with my love for my former church, its people, and the memories of a life where it was an anchor for my family. We are who we are right now, as a family and as believers, in large part because of our beautiful, formational experiences in that church.
Lamenting churches past—and trees past—is right and good. Sometimes, people leave a particular church not because they needed something else but simply because they were called somewhere else. (Commuting 10-plus hours each way for Sunday morning worship isn’t very practical.) Leaving a beloved church, though, doesn’t mean ever forgetting its goodness, beauty, and the immense blessing it was in one’s life.
In his epistles, Paul writes to church after church that he has known, visited, and often even planted—and then had to leave behind, in some cases never to see again. Clear in each of those letters is his love for those believers and his gratitude for knowing them. Even separated, they continue to occupy his thoughts and prayers for the rest of his life.
“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now,” he writes in opening his letter to the Philippians (1:3–5, ESV). “For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints,I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers,” he reflects in writing to the church at Ephesus (1:15–16).
To be a member of a good church for a season, whether long or short, is a blessing that lasts a lifetime. We love our new church in Ohio, too. It is a cherished gift—a rich tapestry of believers who live out the very best of what the church should be each day.
Nadya Williams is a homeschool mom, a writer, an editor, and the interim director of the MFA in creative writing at Ashland University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Christians Reading Classics and is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy.
