Today has seen an event that demonstrates how the smallest thing can cause the greatest pain. I am writing this post in part to exorcise some very negative feelings in the style of Blog Self-Counselling. Don't read on if you don't fancy it.
The thing is, I lost my beautiful and beloved Dad a few years ago. It wasn't a tragic death in the sense that he sort of went when it was time, and he went peacefully - but he was my dad. I cannot adequately find words to express my love for that funny little man, a person who gave up so much to take my mum and her young family into his life a while after my birth-father had died. He would have told you that he gained much more from being our dad than he lost by sacrificing his retirement peace and quiet (he was appreciably older than mum, but they still enjoyed over twenty years of marriage). Daft old bugger died on mum's birthday too - silly old sod.
Due to many factors, chief among them being good old procrastination probably, only recently did we inter his ashes and in his memory plant a young tree. It would have been just what he would have chosen too, so we felt proud.
The thing is with such 'shrines' (and we see them in abundance at roadsides these days), is that while they are in themselves simple and not of the living, they become the place where we pour so much of our latent grief. That little tree became important not just it was a little tree, but because it was dad's little tree. If I had courage to say or believe it, that tree became the next nearest thing that we had to dad.
Until that little tree was vandalized and snapped. Killed, murdered, defiled, desecrated. To me, my mum and probably to my brother and sister, it isn't the murder of a tree that would have grown strong and proud over decades, but of my dad and his memory.
I am left unable to get breath. Yes, it was only a bloody tree, but it was my daddy's tree. I live my life to help others and love them into the Kingdom, but there are bits of me that would commit a crime at the moment. Of course, the vandals did nothing to my dad, and probably didn't even know the tree meant anything - but it doesn't feel that way, not a little bit. I am now languishing in the darkest mood I have known for some times, and better for those vandals that I live two hours away. Perhaps it is my job to forgive, like good Christians should, and maybe I will.
But I can't do it now. Not yet.
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