Tornadoes, Trees, and the Family of God

I was on a plane when the tornado hit our town last Sunday. My phone buzzed with notifications while I stood in line to board my connecting flight to California. My husband, sister, brother-in-law, and I had been planning our trip to the West Coast for six months, and I stood with indecision before boarding our final flight. Should we go home? Are our church members and friends okay? Is our house okay? My neighbor told me the power was out all over town but our house looked okay. Those massive trees towering over my eighty-year-old house—I was a little worried. A friend promised to walk around our yard to look for damage. Another friend with a key promised to go inside and check for any leaks. We boarded our plane and spent a week enjoying the coastal highway towns, assured by our friends and church members not to worry about what was happening at home.

Before this trip, my husband and I had both recently read Andrew Peterson’s book, The God of the Garden, so we noted every California tree we hadn’t seen in our neck of Southern Missouri. From the bleached-white eucalyptus trees growing in Napa to the scrubby cypress trees clinging stubbornly to the edge of rocky coastal cliffs to the towering redwoods hugging the bumpy one-lane path to Pfeiffer Beach, the trees told a story of a landscape used to strong Pacific winds, hundreds of days of sun each year, and endlessly crashing waves. The last time I vacationed in Central California, my sister and I explored Muir Woods where the redwoods grow in a quiet sanctuary. The signs along the boardwalk explained why the trees grow in groups. Redwoods have a shallow root system, so to withstand the strong winds from the Pacific Ocean, the trees grow in families with their roots all tangled up. With intertwined roots, the tall trees can stand firm, less likely to fall in a strong windstorm. There were trees lying on their sides throughout the woods, but it was clear that most of them had grown alone, outside of a family.

We were thankful to come home from our trip and find our house in one piece. On our way to church yesterday, a week after the storm, we surveyed the damage. Downed trees peppered nearly every block. Talking with church members before and after corporate worship, everyone recounted the moments when the sirens sounded and warned them to take cover. My friend Kathy told me how she’d called her neighbors and left the front door unlocked so they could run over and hide in her basement. They all huddled down there until the storm passed, holding children and listening to the trees fall in the backyard.

I took a walk this morning and noted all the trees that had crushed garages and porches and vehicles. Sugar maples, tulip trees, pines—all sorts had come down with the 80 mile per hour winds. I drove through town to the grocery store and gasped when I saw the biggest area of damage. Roofs were blown off houses, century-old trees shorn off in that way that only tornadoes can do. Homes crushed, businesses ruined. The Missouri Baptist disaster team could be seen working all around town clearing debris. The buzz of chainsaws is the soundtrack of our city. I tapped my brakes and slowed when I neared the worst section of town. Memories crowded, fighting for top billing. All those nights growing up in West Tennessee when my parents pulled us kids out of bed and led us to the hallway, the bathtub, the closet under the stairs—whatever was safest in each house of my childhood.

The city where I grew up saw several devastating tornadoes during my years there, and we were well-acquainted with the shorn limbs of those towering trees, of how metal from a building three miles away could coil and embed itself around a telephone pole. I remember seeing a historic church carved in half, the roof and half the sanctuary simply gone. But that little shelf of hymnals stood lined up perfectly, undisturbed. I even drove through a house after a storm once. The house had rolled off its foundation and landed in the street. The city workers had sawed through the house to open up the road for cars. I drove right through its middle. It had light blue siding and white trim.

The trees in Tennessee and Missouri don’t grow in families like the redwoods in California do. There’s no ocean gale sweeping through the South or Midwest, pushing down trees that grow alone. But there are tornadoes, and the storms are dangerous and confusing and don’t follow any rules in their skipping about, leveling a building while leaving the books on a shelf. It doesn’t make any sense. The trees would be safer in families.

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This June marks nineteen years of my husband’s pastoral ministry in our Missouri town, and if I’ve learned anything from being firmly entrenched within the body of Christ in one place for such a long time it’s that the tangled roots of the church provide safety for its members. When we grow closely together, our lives are enmeshed in a way that makes it hard to fall away, makes it difficult to run after sin and shipwrecked faith. We’re living, serving, working, worshiping, giving, fellowshipping, discipling, and praying together both inside and outside the church building, and when we’re that involved in one another’s lives, we’re more likely to stand firm “through the fiercest drought and storm.” Trees that grow in families make it through the storms. Believers who grow in families have the support they need to make it through trials and suffering and temptation.

I think about those isolated fallen redwoods sometimes. I think of people, too, who have left the family of God and tried to live a solitary life without tangled roots. What’s hard about living as a family is that we do hurt one another sometimes and we do need to receive correction sometimes and none of us are as strong as we like to think we are. But when Jesus is the vine to which we’re all clinging and His Word is the soil where we’re planted together—then correction is love, hurts can be forgiven, and strength comes in numbers. Endurance grows tall when our roots are tangled up. I hope to stay tangled up with these dear people for the rest of my life.

Storms blow hard up against us in life. Following Jesus does not protect us from grief, loss, pain, or sorrow. But following Jesus with others who follow Jesus does protect us from falling away in isolation. Some days, those roots might feel like they’re knitted a bit tightly together, but they’re there for our endurance. They’re there for our protection. They’re there for our growth.

Redwoods grow in families. So do Christians.

Redwoods grow in families. So do Christians. Share on X

Muir Woods, Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash