Why Crosses?

Living in Florida comes with a few unavoidable hazards. Sunburn is one. Sweat stained shirts is another. The much more serious issue facing Sunshine State residents is the annual threat of hurricanes. They can be deadly. Trust me, it was my job to do storm coverage as a television reporter in Florida for over nine years and I spent many summer afternoons standing outside a live truck, soaked and tossed by the wind, aiming to deliver accurate life-saving information about massive storms.

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A hurricane came along in the summer of 2020 that spelled the end of a giant maple tree in my front yard. I knew it was dying. It needed to be trimmed but I figured it could make it through the impending storm. Well, I was wrong. The tree toppled in the wind and nearly hit my house. The sound of it making impact with the ground was like that of a dump truck ramming a cliff. It settled just feet from my front door. It was a bit scary, and we were thankful our home was spared.

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The next morning, I went outside to review the damage. Everything was fine. I grabbed my chainsaw and started to cut up the branches into chunks, intending to trash them all. But, when I started peeling back the bark of the once-towering tree, I noticed there was something interesting about the wood behind the bark that I’d never seen before. This tree was spalting.

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If you’re not an arborist or woodworker, it’s likely you’ve never heard the word ‘spalting’ before. No big deal. It’s not something you can even see when looking at the outside of a tree, so it’s understandable how this natural phenomenon remains hidden from most people.

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That doesn’t mean most people wouldn’t appreciate it.

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Scientifically speaking, spalting “is any form of wood coloration caused by fungi. Although primarily found in dead trees, spalting can also occur in living trees under stress. Although spalting can cause weight loss and strength loss in the wood, the unique coloration and patterns of spalted wood are sought by woodworkers”. (Spalting - Wikipedia)

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Spalting is something that caught my eye a little over a year ago when I began my amateur woodworking hobby. In the woodworking world, spalting is the highly-desirable byproduct of decay. What a weird sentence, right?

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I asked a friend to cut up the wood into slabs. I took them home and sliced them into strips. I wasn’t sure how I’d use them, I just knew the lines left behind from the fungus made the wood very attractive. It wasn’t until I got interested in making crosses from wood and epoxy that it hit me – the spalted wood was perfect for this creation.

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Spalting reminded me a lot of sin. If left untreated, the fungus in the tree will eventually kill it entirely. If left unaddressed, the sin inside each person will surely kill them also. Each individual line left by the fungus is unique to the tree. No tree’s spalt lines look the same just like no one person’s sin looks the same. Sometimes sin can look and feel attractive, but it’s really just a sign of a slow death.

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There is no real hope for the tree once spalting sets in. It’s very difficult to treat it since it’s very hard to even see it from the outside. Sin is similar. Sometimes we hide it to the point where it’s so well hidden, well-meaning friends can’t even help you address it because it seemingly doesn’t exist. But it’s still there. Slowly eating away at your soul.

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Unlike a tree, sin in people can be expunged. It’s washed clean, taken away, by the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on the cross. When sin is nailed to the cross it becomes something much different. The cross makes us beautiful again because of Jesus, even though sin is part of our past.

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It made perfect sense to use the spalted wood in (most of) my crosses.

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I’ve sold many of these and used different kinds of wood to create custom crosses. The spalted wood is still my favorite – not because of the look of the finished product, but because of the story. It’s a reminder that even though we are still sinners, the cross fixes it all.