Tree of Endurance

I submit this from my "Forest diaries" while working in Marysville Wa. I spent evenings and mornings camped on the Puget Sound near Kayak Point with a glorious view of the Olympic Mt's in the distance and Puget Sound at my feet.

" Broad spaces for broad thinking........I come to the beach to think widely. The forest is for meditative reflective thinking. The rivers ,meadows, beaches are for limitless applications and adventures in thought and prayer.

Thoreau does it again where he in pure genius says,'Read not the times, read the eternities. Conventionality's are in length as bad as impurities.....knowledge does not come to us by details but in flashes of light from heaven.' and, ' 'Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open and to which closed. The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.'

As I write and reflect I receive my own flash from heaven. There is an old fir tree I pass each morning on my way to prayer at the beach. The tree must be 4-500 years old marred by time, topless from a windstorm, burned thoroughly at the base by some severe fire a century or two previous, limbs broken.......but there it stands still living, green and growing. It stands for the wisdom of character, the victory of patience in time. Most of all, for want of possessing any defensive mechanism, it stands for patient endurance,long suffering, humility and grace.

Life has done it's worst to the tree yet it waits patiently and continues to function. It nourishes the forest with it's foliage spitting out oxygen and enriching the soil with it's used up needles,limbs and spent seed cones. With every breeze it dispenses life. What a great metaphor for serving under pressure with patience and careful endurance. I call it the tree of endurance.

My mind in prayer went to Romans 9:22 with my thoughts still lingering on the battered but enduring tree. 'What if God , choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the object of his wrath- prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy whom he prepared in advance for glory-even us whom he also called...?' Even if God chose me to be an object of his wrath to demonstrate his mercy, as in the case of the enduring tree, then so be it. He is incapable of wrong no matter how trying life and circumstances may be. Job said, 'Tho God slay me yet will I serve him', I add amen. Paul the apostle said,' Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.'

May I not be spent and used up by the trivialities and abuses of life, but mayI patiently endure with joy and cheerful service at whatever God allows me to do. I will be as wise and enduring as the old tree and without complaint take whatever life throws at me and continue to dispense life with every breeze."