Family Tree began as an attempt to understand the complicated inheritance left by my father's decision to abandon our family. Standing in the foreground, he holds the axe that felled the great tree lying behind him—a portrait of the destruction that divorce brought into our home. Yet he is not depicted as a monster or caricature. His quiet expression reflects the uncomfortable truth that those who wound us most deeply remain fully human, carrying both dignity and brokenness. The fallen tree becomes a family portrait, its severed trunk marking the moment when what had once grown from a common root was permanently altered.
Despite its subject, the drawing refuses to become a story of condemnation. New shoots emerge from the stump of the fallen tree, echoing Isaiah's promise that "a shoot shall come forth from the stump of Jesse." Even the wooden handle of the axe—the instrument fashioned from another living tree—has begun to sprout, its vines winding around my father's arms until the distinction between restraint and embrace becomes unclear. Nature itself resists the finality of death. The symbols suggest that while human beings possess the power to destroy, they do not possess the final word over what God chooses to restore.
Family Tree is ultimately less about my father's failure than about God's persistent work in the aftermath of it. The drawing acknowledges that some wounds never disappear and that reconciliation does not always mean restoration of what once was. Instead, it bears witness to a quieter hope: that grace continues to grow from cut stumps, that redemption often begins in places marked by profound loss, and that God remains at work in every member of a broken family—including the one who first raised the axe. The vines climbing from the axe handle around my father's arms became, for me, a picture of that mystery: the possibility that the same God who nurtured new life in our fractured family was also patiently at work redeeming the man who had broken it.
