| Begin or End each week with a Meaningful Inspiration. |
Here Today, Mulch Tomorrow by Tim Knappenberger |
Here in the Mid-West, one of the year's
most beautiful seasons is Fall. On those Fall days when
the sun is shinning and the sky is blue, the vibrant
yellows, reds, and oranges from the trees seem to burn in
contrast against the deep greens of the lawns and pines.
Despite living over 40 Falls now, I only grow more in awe
of the absolute beauty of God's Creation. With that beauty, however, comes work. We have quite a few trees on our lot. When autumn's beauty turns brown and drops to the ground, we get to rake it. As a child, the only fun I found in this ritual of raking was diving head-first into the piles we'd spent hours collecting together. I have to confess that even now, when raking, I'll look around to see if anyone is watching. Judging the coast is clear, I'll do one of those backward "Nestea dives." (Too old for that head-first stuff any more.) We have so many trees that it takes a good half dozen or so major rakes to gather all that falls on the ground. Since we're fortunate enough to have a strip of woods on our property, we throw bushel upon bushel of leaves into the woods to mulch. Folks not as fortunate have to rake, stoop, gather, bag and haul away. Our biggest task is herding our "arboreal strays" back where they came from. At the height of leaf dropping season, the piles grow larger and larger. Sometimes it seems that the house will disappear beneath them. The first year in our home, I worried about what we would do with all of them come Spring. However, to my surprise, when Spring came they were gone! Well, not vanished-into-thin-air gone, but mulched-into-soil gone. Hundreds and thousands of leaves that just a few months before would have clogged the most powerful mower, stood in firm defiance of the mightiest leaf blower, and buried dozens of playful Kindergartners were now just fertilizer for the plants and flowers. How like those leaves are many of our problems and crisis's of the moment. At their height, they pile up around us, threatening to bury us. We sweat, toil and rake away at them. We think we've managed to clean up our little corner of world, only to wake up the next day and find ourselves with a new layer of problems. Sometimes we feel like Sisyphus, pushing our rock up the hill each day only to have it roll back down again the next. When we survey the landscape, Satan, working in conjunction with our human fears, looks at the here-and-now of our messes and convinces us that these problems of ours will never go away. Blanketing our lives, it's hard not to see them everywhere we look. God, however, has a different view. Sure, He sees the mounting pressures of the immediate. He knows the pain, fear, and anxiety of our todays. But God also sees the Spring. And he asks us to look, in faith, down the road to see that many, if not most, of these "piles" will wilt, dry up, and crumble beneath the feet of Time or in the loving hand of The Gardner. Interestingly enough, in Revelation, leaves represent healing, not hassles. So, what's gathering at your feet? Throughout Scripture we're called to wait on the Lord. Often our waiting grows faith. Often waiting brings the solution to our problem. In both cases, we're the better for it.
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| 1 Then the angel showed me the
river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle
of the great street of the city. On each side of the
river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of
fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of
the tree are for the healing of the nations. Rev
22:1-2 (NIV) |
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Please drop Tim a line at knapp@raex.com |
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