A reflection by Trevor Bechtel on April 12th 2026

The story of the tree lobster is one of my favorites, and I imagine that they might become one of yours too. I say this because in the year 2000 you would have been a fool to believe that they would be restored to their original place in the world and now there is just one more step to that happening. In 2000 there was nothing available to them but hope. Now they are an international success story.

We are a people committed to hope even in most dire of circumstances and stories of the possibility of this kind of redemption are important to us. From the perspective of the tree lobster there may seem like there is a lot of luck to this story. It’s bad luck originally as you are driven from your home by rats. But somehow a few of you manage to hitch some kind of ride 13 miles from your home to a massive rock in the middle of the ocean where you are able to find the tea tree that you love to eat and are able to survive there for decades until you are found and then taken to zoos in San Diego and Melbourne where breeding populations in the hundreds are established. 

But from the perspective of the people who have worked to save the tree lobster luck has meant a lot of hard work. It starts with the people who decided they should climb Ball’s Pyramid, at night, to see if they could find any stick insects with really the only indication they might find some being that some dead ones had been found forty years earlier. Then there is long process of deciding that it was worth the effort to extirpate Lord Howe Island of the rats. Around 1000 islands have been extirpated of the rats that infested them during the Age of Sail. But doing so on an inhabited island is much more tricky, both because you can’t just drop rat poison from airplanes and because you need the people to agree that it is worth doing. It’s not just the tree lobster that stands to benefit from the extirpation of rats. Many birds and plants have seen their populations fortified with the exit of the rats. But it was still only a 52% majority of the population that agreed to attempt the eradication. Many people did not think that it was possible, and this isn’t necessarily a cynical view. To extirpate a population, to remove all trace of it, you need to be 100% successful and if poison is the way to do this then that means that you need every single rat to encounter and engage with the poison. By October 2019 the people on Lord Howe Island thought they had done it. They weren’t getting any indication that any rats were left. Then, in 2021 some rats ran across a path in front of a couple out for an evening walk. The people remobilized and removed about a hundred more rats. But now in 2025 a final report has been released and we are pretty confident the rats are gone. The final step in reintroducing the tree lobster is convincing the people to invite them back to Lord Howe Island. Would you think twice before welcoming back a 5 inch long insect which weighs as much as a sparrow to your backyard?

And one could imagine a psalm that extols God for the redemption of the tree lobster. 

When my enemies rose up against me O God 

You found a space for me in the cleft of a rock

When my hopes were lost

You sent a steward to protect me

Now restore me to my rightful home 

Bring me forth again in its pleasant landscape 

And restore me to my soul. 

Our next worship series is called, “My life flows on” and we are going to have people talk about songs they have found meaningful or they like and I did get the message that I’m not supposed to only talk about creatures that I like. So here’s some of the Hannah Georgas song Home. It’s not about the tree lobster, but I don’t think they would mind the connection, especially the chorus.

Home

I think that you lost me

Home

Where’d you go

Home

Don’t know what you mean

Home

(Play song)

Working all the time

Will it ever pay off

And running all over makes me so lost

Everyone around me is growing up so fast

I’m sitting here thinking how the hell did time pass

I know it can’t be all that bad but I feel like I’ve lost my path

I was first introduced to Hannah Georgas when she opened for Broken Social Scene on their 2023 tour. I have long loved Broken Social Scene a super band of Canadian Pop Stars convened by a couple of dudes my age. I have had a few experiences were I when to a concert without learning about the opening act and regretted it. The most notable time was going to see R.E.M. in Toronto in 1989 a couple of months before the Indigo Girls self titled album shot them to stardom. I really wish I’d paid more attention to them then and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake so I started listening to Hannah Georgas and found that there was a lot there. I was interested to learn that her 2020 release, All That Emotion, was produced by The National’s Aaron Dressner.  I listened to the National’s 2013 album Trouble will Find Me a fair amount the last time I lost work in 2016. Although there isn’t necessarily a ton of musical overlap between Georgas, Broken Social Scene and The National their lyrics all have an emotional directness that I really appreciate. Georgas song “Better Somehow” is emblematic of this. 

I get scared trying to pass the trucks on the highway

I miss you sometimes and I hate that I do

I can’t see me going easy on myself anytime soon

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care

Maybe if I say it out loud it will all be better somehow

It will all be better

It will all be better

Better Somehow, which how I titled this sermon when Michelle ask for a title, is a more melancholy song musically than Home. There is a contrast in Home between lyrics that express a loss of home and a really catchy chorus. I’m not always sure what to make of this contrast. I wonder if part of it is a hopefulness that sometimes get’s expressed in words, but sometimes can only be expressed in music, when something positive to say can’t really be found. 

I am grateful to writers like Hannah Georgas for expressing these kind of thoughts in ways that I can access emotionally. I am grateful to have language for my feelings. 

This is where I have found my self in relationship to my work in the last while. I’ve shared before that I have had a difficult couple of years at the research center where I work. It started when some of the projects I was managing stopped moving forward due to turmoil at Washtenaw County, My job was cut to half time and more and more responsibility was taken away from me. In the last few month I have tried to turn what was for me becoming a vocation into just a job, but I have realized that my identity is too caught up in my work to do that. My identity is probably too caught up in my work period. 

I have realized that I need to quit my job and turn my attention to myself for a time. I need to exercise more and I need the space to make that my first priority in my day. So after the projects for this year were all wrapped up for me a couple weeks ago I handed in my letter of resignation.

I feel a bit like the tree lobster chased off the island paradise to go over and hang out on a piece of rock for while. I think, “Maybe if I say it out loud it will all be better somehow”

I am very cognizant of how privileged I am to be able to do this. COBRA guarantees that Susan and I can continue to have health insurance but it will be expensive. But we can afford to do this especially since I inherited some money from my money last year. I know not everyone can and that bothers me.

I feel a bit like the tree lobster coddled in a zoo where the zoo is a kind of generational privilege only some of us insects have access to. 

But I also believe that everyone should be able to step back from work when it isn’t working out for them. I am proud that I have realized that I need to do this and that I have done it. I have also realized that if I am going to effectively step back from work, I should step back from all of my work, and so I asked for 4 months leave from Shalom, which PCRC and Council have granted. This Sunday will be my last working until the end of August. I may attend church a couple of time over the summer but mostly I will be taking some time away. I will still be around Ann Arbor and this isn’t a don’t contact Trevor situation. But it is a don’t talk to Trevor about work situation. 

My plan really is to exercise and with that focus on my physical health hopefully be able to start to address other parts of my self, and especially my joy, that have been lacking over the last while. 

I have wondered if the world I lived in were different if I would have been able to weather the toxic environment at my work but I have realized that my identity is too caught up in the world to do that. My identity is probably too caught up in the world period.

In the passage read for us today Habakkuk attacks those who evilly profit from illicit gain and set their nest on high. While the tree lobster escapes to a nest on high to find a place that God has prepared for them, those who profit from illicit gain will have the very building materials of their house cry out against them. Oil companies are recording record profits with the rise in prices. Beirut and Isfahan and Kiev have become cities of bloodshed and nations are exhausting themselves for nothing. Tuesday was the first day in decades that I thought a nuclear bomb might actually be detonated in a act of war. 

I am grateful to writers like Habakkuk for expressing these kind of thoughts in ways that I can access emotionally. I am grateful to have language for my feelings. 

But even more, I am grateful for the hope that Habakkuk insists on. All of the woes Habakkuk mentions come careening into verse 14. 

For the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the water covers the sea. 

May it be so.