Twisted chaos in trees results in something called burl wood.  It’s when a tree – any tree – has grown in a deformed manner.  It creates knots that are commonly found in the trunk or branches and comes from stress, injury, virus or fungus.  Sometimes burls grow underground attached to roots as a malignancy that’s not discovered until the tree dies and falls over.

Father said that He sees these anomalies in our own lives differently than we do.

Crisis and chaos cause injury, stress, and disease in us.  We scream out in pain wanting it to stop because we believe it will kill us. And sometimes it does, just as trees sometimes die from their injuries.

But it’s those that survive and heal in spite of the damage, that become burl wood.

The healing process doesn’t erase the damage, it encases it and changes the grain of our growth. The key is in the healing. It creates something that can be likened to burl wood.

Burl is prized for its beauty and rarity.  Furniture makers, artists, and sculptors seek it for its unique qualities of strength and resistance to splintering. And because of its value, there are many poachers in National Parks. Even when the tree dies, it lives on with more value than any other.

A few years ago, Father gave me a vision of a staircase made of burl that represented my life.  It’s an amazingly fabulous staircase whose cost would be prohibitive to build.  And that high cost is because of that wood.

Father used burl wood to create this staircase because He saw value from the way He healed me.   The damage and pain were not the victors in my story anymore. Not because I didn’t see some types of death. I did. But in spite of death, His healing worked to change the DNA of my heart. And, I survived.

When I was desperate to escape the pain and damage of my life, He told me to walk forward and heal.  He said He would heal me and make me hard in a way that would be strong and not splinter.

That’s the real essence of Overcoming.

We change into a hardness that is not unloving.  It’s just undamageable.  And there’s the difference.

We don’t actually die inside His resurrection power because nothing can kill something that keeps coming back to life.  And when we know this victorious dichotomy, it’s when we can stand before chaos and say “Do your worst because you won’t win.  Even if you kill me, I will rise again.”

I wanted to share this revelation because we often spend great amounts of time trying to erase the effects of the calamities in our lives.  We believe that perfection means without flaw.  We don’t realize that we are like burl wood.  It is the flaw itself when healed, that becomes the priceless pearl.

I believe He is saying “Stop spending so much time trying to erase them.  Let me make something extraordinarily beautiful from your wounds.  Let me!”