During the Easter season, the tree at station 6 of our Good Friday installation will be transforming as we continue to reflect on how we may be experiencing death and new life in our lives. The tree came from David Byrne’s Arboretum drawings of roots and trees that helped him process personal reflections, using the tree as an alternative type of timeline.  Good Friday to Easter is also an alternative type of timeline – death and then new life, with no promises of what that transformation will look like.

As we remember Christ’s death, what are some ways we are experiencing death this season?

How are we dying to:
The ways we see God?
The ways we see ourselves?
The ways we see others?

At station 6, we were asked to write a word or phrase on the wall in each of the areas we are experiencing death.  Like Jesus committed his spirit in surrender to God without knowing where it would take him, participants were asked to feel the weight of that powerlessness while trusting that new life will birth in time.

We’ve cut out leaves to draw us back to that meditation, to help us pay attention -week after week – to how God is transforming those deaths in our lives.  These green leaves symbolize the new life. If you feel comfortable, take a leaf and one of the words that you wrote (or you identify with) to the back wall as an act of trust and remembrance that God will bring new life to this part of your life in time.

[Photo by the 4 headed lion @ Flickr]