An interventionist God
What do you believe?
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The tree crashed in our woods during a storm this spring. Now its trunk stretches in sections across the swamp, chainsawed by children who delighted in helping their father turn a fallen boxelder into firewood, its limbs into logs. But the upheaved base that remains is equally fascinating, roots ripped from the ground and tipped toward the sky.
Naturalists call this a windthrow.1
I had always thought the turned-up roots of a downed tree were called a windfall. Somewhere I picked up the phrase, passed it on to my children as we hiked—Look at that!
Yet after the tree tumbled in our forest, I learned that a windfall is actually the fruit that has fallen from a tree, knocked down by wind. Or, by symbolic extension, a large sum of money or unexpected bonus. Makes sense that nature’s windfall would be positive in origin, for humans to stretch the metaphor to lottery winnings or a surprise inheritance.
But last month while hiking, my spouse told me that the rare Blakiston’s fish owl in Russia, elusive and endangered, needs a dead tree trunk in which to live.2 “Just like this,” he noted as we stood stretch-necked at the foot of the former tallest white pine in Minnesota, a giant that towered over 100 feet tall before its top broke off in a windstorm.
So which is a windthrow: the devastating loss of a tree or the making of a necessary home for a threatened species? Which further begs the eternal questions: did God cause the tree to fall? Or did God sit back and let it fall?
Or does God not care either way?
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In terms of divine intervention, Christians tend to fall along a spectrum of belief, from Jesus gave me this parking spot to God set the world spinning and then sat back to watch.
At various points in my life, I might have accepted either alternative. At every point in my life, I have wrestled with what to believe about God and humans and suffering.