When I was young and young, my parents often called me: “crooked tree”!
What they meant by this I am not sure, but it certainly referred to the fact that I was not like the others: I was difficult, unpredictable, even disliked.
That is how I am! At least, his is how society sees me: A crooked tree, a tree that has grown crooked. Instead of being straight like all the other trees in the forest, it grew crooked?
Why;
I can imagine that … as a seed that it originally was, it fell under a large protruding rock…
It began to rise straight, towards the sky, but when it reached the rising rock it was forced to grow parallel to the ground for several meters until it outgrew it, and then, the young tree turned again towards the sky and grew straight, tall and strong, different, but stronger from the other trees, since, from the beginning, it had to adapt and fight in order to survive, reach the height of the other trees in the forest, and finally see the light of the sun.
The loggers, wood-cutters, who were looking for trees that are straight by passed the crooked tree. They saw no use for it.
Until, that is, the chief engineer saw it! He saw it and was ecstatic! This tree was exactly what he was hoping to find!
His was building the strongest and largest ship of the royal navy, the king’s ship, and the shape of that tree was exactly what was needed to build its stern!
Something similar is also reported in the bible:
The Christ, the long awaited Messiah, was prophesied as being something like a crooked tree, more precisely a strange, peculiar rock that the builders of God’s temple found no use for it, and rejected it.
And yet, it turned out that this despised, crooked looking rock was the stone that was absolutely necessary to uphold all the building the Temple of God, the cornerstone that would hold all the other stones into place!
Most of God’s Old Testament prophets, were despised and rejected by their contemporaries!
Jesus himself was despised, rejected and not recognized by the religious elite of his day!
So, let us also pay attention, not to criticise, ridicule and reject those who are different from others, who look like crooked sticks …
Their value could be much higher than ours!