A Story About a Great Big Olive Tree

Jacob 1-5

Jacob 5:11 It grieveth me that I should lose this tree.

When this book began, Lehi was the prophet. But then Lehi died and Nephi became the prophet. Then Nephi died and his brother Jacob became the prophet. And Jacob, just like Nephi and Lehi, spent a lot of time writing stuff down.

And that is normal for prophets. They write about a lot of things, but mostly they write about Jesus. Throughout history, they’ve written their words on wood, on paper, and even on stone. But the stone was very heavy and it was hard to read or move around from place to place. The paper and wood were nice for a while but they would get old and begin rotting and cracking and breaking and soon enough, they were impossible to read. And so the prophets wrote the most important things on sheets of metal. Precious metal.

The metal was expensive like gold but that’s not what made it precious. It was precious because it didn’t corrupt or grow old or die like sticks, and paper, and people. If you wrote on a piece of this metal, the writing just stayed around for hundreds, thousands, millions of years. This precious metal was the most eternal thing they knew besides their own souls. And only God could write on souls.

And that’s why the metal was precious. And that’s why the prophets spent so much time writing their words on these precious pages. So that it would last longer than them, and longer than their children, and longer than their cities, and longer than their civilizations, and longer than anything else they could write on. So that no one would ever forget about Jesus.

Jacob and all the prophets knew that even though they wrote about Jesus in precious metal books that wouldn’t die, that didn’t mean people would ever read the books. And even when people read the books, they might still not believe them. They might reject Jesus. But even so, Jesus would not reject them. Because Jesus is like a big rock. You can stub your toe on it. You can kick it. You can hate it. But it’s still there, strong and hard as ever. And when you need something strong and hard as a rock to stand on, it’s there waiting and willing to support you. And when you return to the rock, the rock says, “I knew you would come back. Now lift me up and you will see that I am as strong as you said, but I am also light.”

But Jacob didn’t know how to tell an interesting story about a rock. Though rocks can be colorful when polished, the vast majority of rocks are not vibrant or exciting, but dull and gray. So while rocks are strong and hard and forgiving, they are also boring. And Jacob was trying to talk about Jesus and he was going to go on for a really long time and he didn’t want anyone to get bored. So instead of talking about rocks, he talked about trees. Olive trees.

Olive trees are not boring. They are big and full of knobs like handholds so that children can climb all over them. They are not so tall that you will be scared of falling. But they are tall enough that if you climb to the top, you will be able to see over any fences and out over plains, and you will see the beautiful world God created for you.

A little bit more about olive trees:

Olive trees can live a long time. There is an olive tree alive today that was alive when Jesus was on the earth, over 2,000 years ago. While they can get a lot older than you or me, they cannot live forever. They have silver leaves. They are shaped like a hurricane. And of course they grow olives. Olives are not sweet like apples or oranges. They are more sour. But they are not sour like lemons or limes. Olives are just like olives. There is nothing else quite like an olive. If you do not like olives, you will soon learn to love olives. Because olives are delicious. 

And this is where Jacob’s story starts. There was a man who had an olive tree. And it grew tasty olives and the man loved to pluck the olives and eat the olives. Sometimes instead of eating the olives, he would smoosh the fruit between two rocks and create oil. And then he would put the oil on things like bread, or pasta, or garbanzo beans.

But then one day, the olives stopped tasting so good. And they stopped producing oil. And when he ate them, they gave him a stomachache. And because olives come from olive trees, there was only one explanation for these bitter olives. There must be something very wrong with the tree. “Tree, it would make me so sad to lose you,” the man said. Which is really just an upside-down, inside-out way of saying, “I love you, olive tree.”

So he tried to save the tree by cutting away the branches that were old and hardened, and he dug around the tree to make the soil soft and light. And he fed the tree with manure, and with water, and with sunshine. And the tree breathed better and grew new branches that reached out towards the sun. But the top of the tree was still dying. And that made the man sad because he loved his olive tree. He said, “Tree, it would make me so sad to lose you.”

So he decided to move some of the tree branches to other trees. Did you know that you could move one tree’s branches to another tree, and the branch will still grow? So if you wanted apricots, but you only had an apple tree, you could go to your neighbor and say “Hello neighbor! Might I use a branch from your apricot tree?” And you could put that branch in your apple tree, and your apple tree would start sprouting apricots, and your tree would look like a little firework exploding with red apples, green leaves, and yellow apricots.

But the man in Jacob’s story didn’t want apples or apricots. He wanted olives. He was an olive conisure. So the man moved the branches from one tree to another. And from other trees back to the first tree. He hoped this little mix around would help the olives taste good again. And it worked! The olives were big and delicious and the tree was happy and healthy which made the man happy because he loved olives and olive trees.

But the olive tree wouldn’t stay healthy forever, because olive trees are like people. Sometimes people are healthy and happy, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re not because they haven’t been fed well, or they had an unhappy day, or it was too hot outside. And sometimes they’re unhealthy and unhappy for what seems like no reason at all. God can give us a perfect day, a good family, and a happy home, and we can still find ways to be miserable. As with people, so it is with olives and olive trees.

And so while the man had given his olive trees everything, the olive trees were still sad and unhealthy. And so the man was sad. The man knew that no matter how many branches he moved from one tree to another, he could not keep the trees alive forever. And so he gathered up all the good olives. And then, because he couldn’t bear to see his trees grow soft with rot or fall in pieces, he burnt all his trees to the ground. He burnt them down while the wood was still strong and hard and the fire would burn hot enough to scorch the earth. Then all that was left was the ground. And under the ground, there were seeds and roots. And from the seeds and roots new trees would grow and they would be young again, and beautiful.

Joshua is an award-winning writer and director. His recent book, Ali the Iraqi, was published by BCC press. Sarah is a literature and theology doctoral student studying the Book of Job in the twentieth century.

Artwork by Maddie Baker.