The Bare Tree That Spoke to a Soldier

In the winter of 1632, an eighteen-year-old French soldier named Nicholas Herman stood staring at a leafless tree in the frozen countryside of Lorraine. The branches were stripped bare, grey and skeletal against a slate sky. Yet something stirred in him — a sudden, overwhelming awareness that the same God who would clothe that tree in blossoms come spring was present with him at that very moment.…