Saved From the Burn Pile

I learned a lesson from my Christmas tree fields. The trees were speaking to me, sharing their wisdom and insight.

Last year was a huge harvest year. Thousands of trees were cut and sold. So what I had left in my fields, after a couple of years of harvesting trees, was about twenty percent of the trees from the original planting, nine years earlier. These trees had been repeatedly passed over for two or three years. But as I viewed the trees that were left, I could see ever more clearly why they were passed over. Once they stood alone with very few other trees to hide them, all their flaws were evident, almost magnified. Some of them were slightly misshapen, some were just very slow in maturing, but the largest number were simply too fat. Way too fat. They were not tended well in the first few years, and trimmed too wide. As the years went by they were trimmed fatter and fatter. Eventually, they became non-sellable. They were only good for the burn pile.

But that’s not the end of the story. Once their flaws became transparent, once those trees were not hiding behind the mass of other trees, they had some hope. You see, the keeper of the trees (that’s me), did not want to see any of them go to waste. I didn’t want to just cut them down and throw them on the burn pile.

So I came up with a rescue plan. It was a plan that required a lot of work, a lot of effort, and a lot of hope. I got a chainsaw and used it almost like a hedge trimmer, and cut the trees back to normal size and shape. Then I had to go back over each one and meticulously trim the scarred and cut tips of the branches back to where the surgery was not noticeable and where new growth could produce a good looking tree.

It took hours and hours of painstaking, tender loving care. But it turned out, come the next season, that I saved some 300 trees from the burn pile. They were so happy. They cried out to me with joy and thanksgiving.  I know you don’t believe me, but I could hear them.

Now here is the lesson that the trees taught me. When we are able to hide from one another we think that no one knows about our flaws, our weaknesses, our failures, our addictions, our shame, our heartache. We grow fatter and fatter, more and more useless, defeated, and non-sellable. We are no longer beautiful, because we have not been tended well, and unless someone puts some tender loving care into us we will be good for nothing but the burn pile. But when we come into the open, when we become transparent, when we trust the real me with our brother and sister in Christ, the keepers of the trees, then we can find healing. In hiding we only buy time, and our condition grows worse and worse, fatter and fatter.

But sin tricks us, and we think we can hide. We think that the pleasure of sin is worth it. But when our ugly condition becomes all too evident we have a choice to make. Do we want to submit to the loving chainsaw, or would we prefer the burn pile?

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” (I Jn 1:7)