A Rusty Old Chevy in the Woods

Growing up in Virginia, I had a backyard that seemed to go for miles, and no one seemed to care about property lines or fences. At the very end of our backyard meadow was a creek, and crossing the creek you entered the woods. My sister and I used to go down to the creek and play house or go exploring. If we followed the creek long enough, we’d end up in our neighbor’s backyard, which was a perfect chance to invite them to come explore with us too. We mostly just enjoyed wandering through the woods, feeling small among the towering pine trees. The woods is a place where you feel safe even when you feel a little lost, the sturdy oak trees standing guard. As we wandered, we would point out birds and flowering plants, and I acted more confident than I was that I could properly identify poison ivy (can you tell I’m an eldest child?).

A path through the woods…where does it lead?

There was one time we went exploring the woods and stumbled upon an old Chevy truck, rusted out, tires buried in the dirt. It almost looked like it was growing up from the ground, so old that it seemed rooted down into the earth like the giant oak trees nearby. As a kid, that rusty Chevy was magical. How did it get here? Who was the owner? How long had it been here? Where was it going when it stopped here? 

After that first sighting of the Chevy, my sister and I would play down at the creek, and sometimes we would talk about going to look for the truck again. We certainly couldn’t retrace the steps we had taken the first time we found the truck, and whenever we tried to explore, the woods seemed to grow and grow. The woods were big and mysterious, with no defined paths or routes. Even so, a few times, we ventured out with the intention of finding the truck, but we would never find it.

Yet there were some days we would decide to simply go explore again, follow the creek to our neighbor’s house, with no thoughts of the rusted Chevy in our minds. And those would always be the times we would find it. Somehow in our wandering, we would stumble again upon the magical truck, and elated, we would revel in the mystery of it, wondering where it would take us if we sat in the cab and started to drive.

There’s something magical about the woods, no matter where they are. “The Woods” is less a description of a forested space and more like its own magical place, somewhere in the middle of Earth and whatever’s beyond. C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia captures this well. Reading the stories, I notice a theme: when the children end up in Narnia, they never really go looking for it, but rather they stumble upon it, often because they go on some other exploratory adventure. After their first trip through Narnia, the old professor who acts as their guardian advises them, “But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get [to Narnia] at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it.”

I think about when I was kid, the times we would find the truck and the times when we wouldn’t. The days we went looking for it were the days we could never find it. But the days we would find it, we were enraptured by what was all around us - it was like we couldn’t help but see magical things everywhere we looked. We would point out the snaking ivy around the trees, or watch the dancing shadows of leaves on the forest ground, or we would listen to the birds calling one another. And in the midst of our enchantment, we would look up and see the truck. It’s like we had been transported to it simply by our wonder at the woods around us. 

There’s this tiny little parable in the Gospel of Matthew, only one verse long, where Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a treasure hidden in a field. It doesn’t appear in the other Gospels, so Matthew must have caught onto something special. It says, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44 ESV).

I wonder what that man was doing that day he found the treasure. Whose field was he in? Why was he digging in the first place? Did he know there was treasure there? The story doesn’t give us much detail, but I like to think maybe he’d heard about a treasure, and today was a day to go exploring. Or maybe he was a worker in that field, faithfully laboring, and he stumbled upon the treasure on that fateful day.

I think this parable is less about the treasure, and more about the man. Jesus doesn’t mention to us what kind of treasure it might be - but a treasure’s value is in the eye of its beholder. A truck in the woods is just a rusty old truck until a curious kid finds it. The treasure in the parable had value because of the seeking, because of the digging, and because of the finding. The treasure in the field was valuable because the man sold everything he had for it. 

I began to understand what the professor in Narnia said once I began to understand more about the Kingdom - the Kingdom isn’t something that’s hidden that we have to go digging up. The Kingdom is all around us. Sometimes it is buried like treasure in a field, but I bet that man was seeing the Kingdom all around him as he went to that field, and all the while as he dug. And I bet when he dug it up, he was filled with curiosity and brimming with questions, so many that he just had to have that treasure - he sold everything he had to own it. It makes me wonder, if I dug up the Kingdom and it looked like a rusty old Chevy - which is a treasure, to a child - would I sell everything I have to buy that plot in the woods?