This much I can do

I have the privilege to run almost daily through a sanctuary of trees, season after season, a changing landscape, embracing the shade of these towering giants, contemplating their innate majesty, and seizing a glimpse of the glory of God in their uplifted limbs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am blessed by someone's hard work of planting trees that grew and bore fruit beyond their lifetimes.  I am blessed by the generosity of others, now long gone, who had the vision of preserving some land they possessed and letting the trees of the forest thrive for the enjoyment of people they would never know.  I am one of them.  

Did those people realize how their ordinary efforts would have taken root?  They could have harvested the trees and sold the land to a developer.  But they didn't.  They chose a different legacy -- to be a witness of what they were able, to be faithful with what God had given, even when it may have seemed at the time something as ordinary and mundane as letting a tree grow.  These were average people who practiced beauty in their spare moments.

I want to whisper back to them:  "Well done, good and faithful servant."  (Matthew 25. 21)  God redeems in ways we cannot know.  The forest testifies before me what faithfulness looks like.

In her fifty year old book Especially at Christmas, author Celestine Sibley wrote:

“Ma had a calendar a patent medicine salesman give her with pictures of Great Americans on it.  She always though every last one of us would be Great Americans.”

He grinned.

“None of us ever got our pictures on a calendar that I know of.  But I have a sister that’s a missionary, three brothers that are preachers and one that’s a doctor.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I plant trees,” he said with dignity.

And what do we do?  Watch the two-minute video on this link if you want to be reminded how God is using you to restore and change the world.

We can be faithful in whatever He has given us to do. Mundane does not appear in God's dictionary. We have no conception of what God is doing through this.  Just that He is.

Faithfulness has no concern for celebrity or recognition or success.  Just responding to God's divine appointments of which we are surrounded day by day, most of which we are unaware.  Would we hesitate if we knew what God does with that kind word that sticks in a heart sixty years later, an encouragement that changes someone's day or direction, the restoration God brings through a single act of grace, or someone observing a hard job well-done?  Or even the planting of trees?

And what about today?  

I can't do everything,

      but I can do something.

I don't need big wins

         or even small ones,

but taking step by incremental step,

    following Him into it.

God never works in singular outcomes.  Faithfulness always results in a million galaxies exploding in the heavens, in which His glory is revealed. 

Later in Sibley's book, she quotes that faithful tree-planter once again:  “You do what you can to help when you see the need,” he said simply. “What happens then is up to the Lord.” 

There is nothing but nothing

         God does not multiply for His glory.