The new bow-saw really is a wonder. It goes through wet wood not quite like a knife through butter, but certainly with less effort than any saw I've ever handled before. Which is just as well, because it's being kept busy these days.

The little ornamental cherry is going to be just fine; it lost one big branch, but there's still lots left, even if it's shaped a little funny after its undesired but necessary radical pruning. The big maples are also going to come through, although they still need much cleaning up. The four scrub spruces, which I detest, are (of course) completely undamaged. But I'm not so sure about the flowering something-or-other (haven't got a clue what it is!) between my garage and the next-door neighbor's house. That tree took a big split, right down the side of the trunk--there's a huge slash of bare wood now, from fork to roots--and it's lost almost two-thirds of its crown. I don't know if it's going to make it.

I figured the best thing to do was to prune off the broken branches and take a wait-and-see approach; if the tree dies, I can cut it down later. So the bow-saw and I got busy, and I lugged branch after branch out to the street-side heap which waits for the municipal chipping machine, like heaps of deadwood all around the town.

As I swung the last branch out and up to the top of the pile, I saw the buds. Even before the ice storm, the tree had started to set this spring's leaf and flower buds. And now they were dead.

God knew each and every one of those leaves-to-be that will never be now--each bud on each twig of each branch of each limb of each tree that was killed by the storm. What a thought... I stood there, bow-saw in hand, and thought for a moment of what it must have been like for wild animals out in that terrible weather, last January, with the unearthly crack and boom of the trees breaking --the horror of it. God would have stayed with their fear and suffering, as God stays with all creatures who suffer, even us.

And there is such a lot of suffering in this life. Oh, it's easy to catalogue--shall we talk about child soldiers in Uganda this week? What about teen prostitutes in Thailand? Or the seal hunt? If God sees the tiny sparrow fall, God does an awful lot of suffering. Look at the sheer volume of pain in human life. Look at what we do to ourselves, each other, Nature--better yet, don't look. It hurts the eyes too much.

This, of course, is the Problem of Evil; if God is good and God is powerful, then why do these things have to happen? An all-loving, all-powerful Deity, some people think, would have stopped the ice storm in its tracks and none of this suffering would have happened. Trying to work that out is what theodicy is all about.

But then there is the mystery of Joy....

An agnostic friend wrote to me (hi Dana!) about what he calls a-theodicy: as we Christians struggle with the Problem of Evil, so his side of the argument has to struggle with the Problem of Love. For love, too, is very real, and so is joy. And if we have to wonder where Evil comes from, so they have to ask themselves whence comes the obvious good in the world?

The tiny tragedy of this branch that will never flower and will decay into the dust (actually into CO2) balances the promise of its sister branch, which will grow and bloom most beautifully. The two don't wipe each other out or compensate for each other; they are balanced, poised against each other. They are like an arch and buttress, one pushing out and the other in, so that the structure stands through opposite tensions. Paradox, again: two opposites that have to live with each other. The problem of Evil, the problem of Good. Maybe we, as Christians, should be paying more attention to the latter.

Meanwhile, the first weeds are springing up in roadside gravel, the creek is rioting over its banks, and the geese are incoming, flapping and whonking, with spring carried under their wings. In the midst of life we are in death, true--but so's the exact opposite. In the midst of Mud Season, among the piles of tree debris from the storm, however grey the skies now are, the green is coming back, one leaf at a time, starting (as always!) underfoot.

For life, love, good, God, will win. We know that from Christ's breaking forth from the tomb, at the far side of next week's story.