A Tree in Winter

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” — Psalm 19:1 (KJV)

When Nicolas was eighteen, he was walking past a tree in the middle of winter. Every leaf was gone. The branches were bare and grey, and the tree looked as dead as a tree can look.

Most of us have walked past a thousand trees like that without a second thought. But Nicolas stopped. He knew what was coming. In a few months the leaves would be back, and after the leaves would come the flowers, and after the flowers, the fruit. Nobody would have to glue them on. Life was hidden in that tree, waiting.

Standing there, he suddenly saw something about God. Beaufort wrote it down like this: he “received a high view of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul.” Providence means God’s care: the way he looks after everything he has made, quietly and faithfully, season after season. Effaced means rubbed out. Over forty years later, it still hadn’t been rubbed out.

It changed everything for him. Beaufort says that view of God “perfectly set him loose from the world” and lit such a love for God in him that, more than forty years on, he could not tell whether it had grown since, because it had been so big from the start.

It is striking how ordinary the moment was. No vision, no voice, no crowd. Just a bare tree and a young man paying attention. God had been showing that tree to people for years. Nicolas was the one who looked.

You are surrounded by things like that tree. The sun comes up every morning whether you notice or not. Your heart beats about a hundred thousand times a day without you asking it to. Rain falls, seeds split open, and bodies heal from cuts. The Bible says the whole world is preaching a sermon about God’s power and care, all day long. The question is not whether God is speaking, but whether we ever slow down long enough to notice.

That is the first lesson of Brother Lawrence, and maybe the simplest. Practising the presence of God starts with paying attention. Before it is a technique, it is a way of looking.

One thing to do this week: go outside once this week without your phone for ten minutes. Find one ordinary thing, a tree, the sky, a plant pushing through concrete, and look at it properly. Then tell God what it shows you about him.