The Branch

During my prayer time in my barn on the morning of July 13th, I felt the weight of the Spirit descend and everything got still and quiet. My eyes were still closed, I had been weeping in prayer and at once I was drenched in peace. He said, “open your eyes”. So I did. He asked, “what do you see?” And I said, “a branch”. And that was it. I was looking out the barn widow at a branch and I didn’t understand.

In the middle of the night last night when I got up to use the bathroom, I thought about what happened in the barn, me opening my eyes expecting something profound and meaningful and all I saw was a branch. Then it dawned on me that it was a dead branch. I saw a dead branch, but I didn’t think about that when I first glanced at it earlier in the day. So I wondered what that meant and resigned to wait to see if God brought a better understanding.

Today when I first sat down to pray in the barn, I looked out at the dead branch, about to pray for God to help me understand, and I saw something on it that looked like a green leaf. But I knew it couldn’t possibly be a leaf because my husband and I cut those branches a week and a half earlier on July 4th weekend. That branch had been sitting in the full sun in a 100+ degree Texas heat wave for a week and a half with zero rain, and all the other branches in the pile were completely bare or had crispy, scorched brown leaves on them.

I walked out to the branch to get a better look, all the while thinking of the impossibility of there being a green leaf on that dead branch, and that I must be seeing something else. But when I got closer, I saw that it was indeed a green leaf. I stood there in awe, looking at something that was impossible. I thought about what the Spirit said the other day, “I don’t ask you to understand, I ask you to trust.” And it was then that I realized that the leaf I was looking at was on one of the branches we cut from our mulberry tree (Luke 17:6). I went back into the barn and wept, and the Spirit directed me to read Psalm 50. Go read it. That is what He says to us in this day.

This is what was in my heart after I read it:
Like a flock birds yield to the prevailing wind, yield to the Lord, trusting him to carry you where you need to go. The earth is His and everything in it. All the earth yields to His voice, all creation stands at attention to His command. He gives life to dead branches, He is our living water in seasons of drought. If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you. The righteous man shall live by faith in the Son of God. Those who put their hope in the Lord shall not be ashamed, those who wait on the Lord will mount up on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.
He calls your name and says to you, “I am here, I am with you.” Will you trust in this in the days ahead? When the Son of Man comes will He find true faith on the earth?

All the host of heaven will wear away, and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; all their hosts will also wither away as a leaf withers from the vine, or as one withers from the fig tree. (Isaiah 34:4)

The surviving remnant of the house of Judah will again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem will go forth a remnant and out of Mount Zion survivors. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this. (Isaiah 37:31,32)

The Mighty One, God, the Lord, has spoken, and summoned the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God has shone forth. May our God come and not keep silence; (Psalm 50:1-3)