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The Blooming Dead Tree
Jennifer Oosterhouse

The Blooming Dead Tree is Station of the Cross  number 4 in the Sanctuary of Redeemer Covenant Church.
The Stations of the Cross are also called, The Way of The Cross, The Way of Sorrow, and The Passion.
Lent is the time before Easter where we remember The death and resurrection of Jesus.  The Stations of the Cross is a prayerful walk through the hours of agony while Christ carries the cross.
We display the Stations of the Cross in our sanctuary during Lent.
Station #4 is where Jesus Speaks to the Weeping Women.
 Luke 23:27-31 ESV
And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. But turning to them Jesus said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your
children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!' Then they will begin to say to the mountains, 'Fall on us,' and to the hills, 'Cover us.' For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"11
The Sacred Space committee had envisioned Station 4  to have a dead tree with tears.
The dead tree was to represent the wilderness a barren place.
My journey in the last year has be lament, so I volunteered to create The weeping women.
I  started painting a face with tears while I thought of Ezekiel and the dry bones.


Ezekiel 37:1-3 
1 The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I thought of the people without hope and people that suffer daily without relief.  I thought of people in constant pain, physical and heart.  Pain that is unbearable.  That is the kind of pain that you want mountains to fall on you.  The pain so great that you want it to end.  I begin to think of about the heart wrenching pain of the weeping women.  They were weeping for Jesus.  Ripped in their hearts for the pain of the suffering Christ; like a mother in anguished over physical or spiritual death of her child.
Three  trees were cut and put in five gallon buckets. We filled the middle tree with sand to help the figure of the woman stand in the tree.  The two outer trees were just plopped in  buckets with a few rocks to keep them from falling over.  We used some duct tape to secure the trees to the side of the bucket.
A black cloth was draped for the body of the weeping women.  The tears were made with plastic bags, blue plastic and crystal beads.
The project had been worked with great Joy!  Every part of my time lamenting had poured itself into this work.   I stepped back and looked and I thought,  "Thank you Jesus this  is a barren place.  The only life was the sad women in her pool of tears.

This last Sunday our Spiritual Formation group walked through the Stations. When they came to station with the Weeping women we talked about  weeping in a dry dead place, a wilderness.
A women in the group then noticed the tree on the left was blooming
and another asked,  "What does that mean?"


Our Spiritual Formation leader replied, "That means there is always hope."


An0ther version
The Blooming Dead Tree 
by Sharon Garlough Brown

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