05/09/2026
My Wintery Tree
“You see him in the back of the room. A heavy-set kid with medium-long black hair, wearing a t-shirt with a psychedelic image of Jimi Hendrix. There’s som**hing really dark. A heavy, disturbing black shadow hovering over him, but you can’t put your finger on it. You instinctively look away. You think to yourself, ‘I’d feel kind of scared to talk to this kid. Why would I even try?’
That kid was me.
For three years, I lived in an emotionally barren winter, trying to outrun my own shadow from one leafless tree to another. The jagged branches of my soul reaching up to the gray sky. I was devoid of life, a tree that offered no shade, no life, and certainly, no fruit. An arrest, expulsion from Christian high school, and seeing the look of hurt and disappointment in my mother’s eyes, it was crisis after crisis that began to expose the frozen heart within me.
The final wintery tree was a telephone pole.
The collision course with my recently bought Ford Maverick and a telephone pole, there was the metallic crunch, the sound of ‘Smoke on the Water’ blaring from the 8-track player that was stuck, and the heavy smell of gasoline. The first person on the scene of my near-totaled car wreck didn’t ask if I was okay, he yelled at me, ‘You better get rid of that dope and bottle of booze between your legs before the cops get here.’
For me, it was coming to the very end of myself that brought me to Christ. I had tried to thaw the ice myself, looking into everything I could to bring a change and thaw the ice in my soul. Yet, I found every religion to be hollow at its core.
On a humid summer night, I finally ran out of moves and stopped negotiating. I stopped explaining. I looked at the barren timber of my life and cried out into the dark: ‘God, if You’re real, save me. Do in me what I cannot do for myself!’
In a heartbeat, som**hing shifted. It wasn’t a gradual spring; it was a supernatural invasion of summer in my heart. The Holy Spirit didn’t just patch up the old wood; He sent the sap of Heaven rising through my veins. The barren branches of my emptiness didn’t just grow leaves; they were swallowed up by a life filled with color and glory.
I look back at that kid in the Hendrix shirt now and barely recognize him. My winter has been over for more than fifty years now.
What about you? What was the wintery tree that finally pointed you toward Christ?” Paul
