This week God told me a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

I was sitting at a red light facing a stormy Lake Michigan, appreciative of a moment to study the churning water and its white caps. Winds over 30 mph rocked my car at the T-intersection as I waited for the green light.

Just then I spotted a tree directly across the road that must have been damaged on another stormy day. Apparently winds had been wild then, too, strong enough to twist the top right off the tree, leaving only a ragged stump. Despite such radical damage, it was growing new branches and taking on a new shape.

I snapped a photo and didn’t think much more about it.

Later, in the middle of the night, a loud noise woke me from a deep sleep, sounding like a giant Velcro patch being slowly torn apart. Since my window was open, the strange sound seemed especially frightening. But then came a giant thud, and I knew what it was — a tree that had just been torn apart.

The next morning I pulled on my boots and went looking. Only a few yards behind the house lay a tree that had been ripped in half from the bottom up and in its fall had pulled down a second tree. Both had landed in an enormous tangle of trunks and branches.

As I studied the damage, an old King James Bible word came to mind: rend. That version of the Bible uses rend to mean a tearing away, a ripping, a splitting. It was a word God used to pronounce judgment – “I will rend the kingdom from them. I will rend their wall. I will rend the heavens.”

Taking a mental measurement of the two fallen trees, I thought about how just the day before, and for years before that, both had stood 50 feet tall, strong and straight. And I thought about the stumpy tree at the red light…. and that’s when God told me a story.

“Though I sometimes rend things away, I usually follow that with a rendering.”

I had to head home to dictionary.com to find out what rendering meant and learned it was to provide or deliver. So, to rend is to take; to render is to give.

God was saying, “Sometimes my story-telling in people’s lives begins with a rending as I separate them from something they want or think they need that is really inappropriate or harmful. But my rending is always done with wisdom and an eye toward positive purposes that will come over time.

That was the beginning of the story.

The middle came next. “If you pay attention, you’ll see that I follow each rending with a rendering. I deliver what’s needed to start again, to experience new growth — much like the tree near the lake. I render the ability to do things better, to make different decisions, to rearrange priorities.

“In other words, I’m behind the rending but also the rendering.”

And the end of the story? “That,” he says, “depends on how you respond to the beginning and the middle.”

“[God] will render to every man….” (Romans 2:6)