A friend sent me a dress this week. It’s a beautiful shade of purple-blue – really it inhabits the borderline between these two colours. It reminds me of flowers with beautiful scents, sweet mysterious fragrances growing stronger at nightfall. The texture of the fabric is delightful, a satin smoothness combined with the roughness of shot silk (though it isn’t made of silk). I love the way the dress is lined with orange fabric – interesting in light of the last-but-one post about complementary colour pairs – orange and blue are complementary on the colour wheel. Also the buttons all down the dress at the back, from neck to hem, a lovely stylish touch.

I saw a tree this afternoon that stopped me in my tracks, intrigued me and also, a little, made me wince. It was in an otherwise unremarkable front garden in a respectable middle-class street. The trunk and every branch was covered in twirling bark. It positively writhed with the gingery-coloured stuff! Instead of being covered in and protected by a neat casing of bark, the tree had all its insides, outside, so to speak – everything was on display! A visual demonstration of the phrase, ‘letting it all hang out’. The twisting, twirling inner-bark (to coin a phrase) made the tree look vulnerable, exposed, and like the tree equivalent of a perpetually emotionally struggling, very needy human being.

As I walked on I realised that those of us who are prone to ‘letting it all hang out’, need to supply ourselves with some ‘bark’ sometimes.

Self-restraint and buttoning one’s lip at times are one kind of ‘bark’. Another is the ‘garment of praise’ we read about in the Scriptures. (‘A garment of praise instead of a spirit of heaviness’.) I couldn’t wait to try on my new dress from a friend – with it on, I felt like a new person. I’m so grateful to God that sometimes all we need is to make a decision to put on the lovely and noble things, and immediately, we will feel and act like a new person.

Reflecting the deeper truth that in Christ, we genuinely are ‘new creations’.