THE RABBIT TREE By Lynn Downham

Hello, friends! Well, I went back to the Sycamore Hole article to see where I left you with the Rabbit Tree and I found that I had explained I am painting the tree of life from Revelation 22. Several years ago, when I was first reading Rev 22:1-2 and the words, “in the midst of the street of it..” opened my eyes to the tree being OVER the river, the “Rabbit Tree” came pretty quickly to my mind.

The Rabbit Tree was a huge tree I had seen many years before, but where?? It didn’t take too long to figure out that it had been North Carolina for I had seen it as a teenager. The “boys” had taken us “girls” to see a really neat, very big tree. I remembered that there had been a trailer that the caretaker lived in and that one of the “girls’” fathers was the caretaker. I remembered that we had walked through a cow

pasture and come upon this tree and that we, (the girls), had all been properly amazed by the sight of it. Rising up into the sky before us was a huge tree with half of it’s massive roots exposed where rabbits had made warrens and burrows. Since the ground level where the tree sat was far above our heads, we were eye level with this giant root system in all it’s glory. For some reason, this picture made an indelible impression in my mind.

You might wonder at this point why I couldn’t immediately remember where the Rabbit Tree was or is. Our family moved a lot while my brothers and I were growing up, mostly in and out of Charlotte, as Dad worked for Continental Insurance and we were always, as my mother liked to say, “subject to transfer”. So I had only been in Lenoir for 2 years or so when I

As soon as I could break away from our busy schedule, my daughter and I drove out to Fort Defiance to look for the Rabbit Tree. I was excited and I had no trouble remembering where Fort Defiance was because my mother now lived right around a few more curves in the road from it. (She had not lived there when I first saw the tree.) So we get to Fort Defiance and go into the gift shop where I knew a girl worked that Mom knew. There was no trailer visible anywhere. I asked the girl, “Do you know about the Rabbit Tree?” and she responded, “Rabbit Tree? I don’t know any Rabbit Tree. Do you mean the Champion Beech?” And I said, “Champion Beech? I don’t know anything about the Champion Beech.” And she replied, “Well, it’s right over there in the corner.” She pointed towards the opposite end of a field.

Still puzzling, my daughter and I headed across this field and there was indeed a very large tree in the far corner. As we reached it I stood there looking, thinking, “Noooo, this is not what I’m looking for,” then, “Wait a minute!”

The massive tree sat on the edge of the field. Just behind it, I could see that the ground fell away down a hill, but there was a forest at the bottom of the hill, not a cow pasture. Nevertheless, my daughter and I slid down the dried leaves on the hill to the bottom where we turned around and stood up gazing at “The Rabbit Tree”! There it was, right where it had been for the last 37 years. I was so excited! But where was the cow pasture? I knew how I had been shown it all those years ago. Over the 37 years, the cow pasture had turned into a forest!

Now, here’s God in all this. When I had been shown that tree all those years ago, I was NOT walking with the Lord, very much the contrary. It was undoubtedly the scariest year of my life and I know I only survived it by God’s amazing grace. But, 37 years later, He uses something from THAT time in my life for His purposes, (the Revelation 22 tree).

I am still today working on renditions of this picture using the Rabbit Tree as a model and I know truly,

“...we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” ~Ephesians 2:10

Have a lovely month! Lynn