Breaking the Temple

There is a temple in Cambodia called Ta Prohm (ប្រាសាទតាព្រហ្). It is one of the most beautiful temples I have ever seen, not because it is ornate or glamorous, but because it is falling apart.

You see, this temple has trees all around and throughout it. For centuries the trees have twisted and contorted, using the temple as their template for growth. Their branches reach through the windows and across the walls, certain rooms and alleyways are more living wood than ancient stone. It's hard to tell where the temple ends and the trees begin.

Until recently, the trees that once grew within the temple are now growing beyond the temple. In the process the structure is beginning to fall apart. Entire sections are inaccessible because of the inevitable wreckage these trees have caused.

I've felt a lot like those trees lately.

The structures that once told me where to turn and how to grow have now become constricting. Every step toward healing destroys more of the structure I was born into. I am grieving the loss of a clear path, uncertain about what lies beyond these walls.

I'll keep going though. Trees know nothing but growth or death, maybe humans aren't so different.

And besides, I have to believe God exists more in the vastness of the Sun than the boundaries of the temple. 

And there will be some wreckage. Because we are breaking through the very structure that guided and contained us for so long. But it is a holy destruction, tearing apart all that made us small and allowing our limbs to stretch toward the Sun.

I can’t help but remember a middle eastern man who burst into a temple tearing apart all their false belief, claiming that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it. In the end he was killed for those words, he came into new life through that death.

So here we go, through the dying and the breaking, into new life.