Trees
Sequoia trees live about 2000 years and only for100 years men started to drive through them with cars. The tallest tree of all is Hyperion measuring115.55 m, making him the world's tallest living thing. At the website of Alameda, CA you can find dozens of postcards of the most popular drivethroughs through the times. It's really interesting to compare them. (But the whole collection is worth a click.) Drive Thru Redwood Tree Postcards. The pictures above are of the world-famous Wawona drive-through tree.
"I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast
A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree."
My father worked with trees all of his life. During the "second depression" of 1938-40 the lumber market plunged and he had a yard of lumber destined to rot. After bankruptcy he turned from lumber to hardwood precision products such as tool handles and agriculture handles; shuttle blocks and picker sticks used in the weaving industry. If it was really good hickory, it was sawed into skis or shunt poles used by the railroads in Europe. Smaller pieces went into ladder rungs for firemen's ladders'. They had to be first class, no-flaw white hickory that would hold a 200-pound fireman a hundred feet in the air.
I loved to work in his mills, carrying water for the workers, rolling sawdust and stacking handles at 8; and grading handles and skis and buying and grading logs and making payroll at 16. Wood smells good when it's being sawed. When ash is being sawed for pitch fork and shovel handles it smells like sweet potatoes.
We lived up on the hill above Grandpa in Medlock Hollow. He had a garage that housed the '29 A Model Ford we used for church, store, town and doctor's office. Beside it, was parked a dusty Model T adorned with spider webs that was never driven, never fired off. I never knew why. I drove it a lot with my own powerful engine and loud horn—to town, to Chicago, California, and Connecticut and all the other towns I could pick up in fireside conversations of guests. (In your mind is what counts.) A long trip like that can make you tired and eager for mother to tuck you in at night.
Grandpa's Model T was an open touring car and sometimes a hen that had flown over the fence out of the chicken yard would roost in the window for the night. Good deal for the hen to roost above the foxes and it kept the sides of the T interesting.
One day the T was gone and that was an earthquake! Down the road at the end of the half-mile driveway and across the steel bridge there lived the Shirley Tinch family. The Depression and a house full of children and no land was an extreme poverty thing. Sometimes we waited for the school bus at their house but my mother didn't like it. Community opinion had it that the main income was from bootlegging you-know-what. But they were nice and the kids played well.
The back of their house was almost over the creek and at times there was enough water to run their turning lathe to make chair posts. The chairs were bottomed with hickory cane made by hand with a horse shoeing drawing knife. Thin slivers of hickory wood soaked for several hours made a very durable chair bottom. http://www.adkdesign.com/hickory.htm. Hickory is the most durable and densest of woods in America. When used in chair bottoms the chairs last more than a lifetime and hold their value. You rarely have to re-cane a hickory chair.
Shirley Tinch and my grandpa made a deal and the Model T was gone. A few weeks later I heard a terrible racket down on the highway that crossed the steel bridge at the end of Medlock Hollow. I could tell it had no muffler and was laboring to make the turn and climb the hill after crossing the steel bridge. A few days later I was out on the highway and heard that same noise. Here came Grandpa's Model T. The engine was louder than the engine I used for traveling the U.S. and the horn was neither honk nor beep but ooooga!
The back of the car body had been cut off and a flat truck bed had been built. Mr. Tinch had loaded the truck as high as he could get it with straight chairs and rocking chairs and had them tied with rope. The Model T labored hard under its load as they went out on another mission to peddle Tinch hickory chairs. With no exaggeration, It looked a lot like Jed Clampett's family truck on Beverly Hillbillies.
We're still talking about trees, the things stick houses and furniture are made of. God knows a lot about making trees, all kinds of trees and petunias and He knows a lot about dropping water 3,000' on delicate flowers and about making tree roots to hold up all that weight in a wind storm and roots that go deep enough to bring up water in dry weather. If you study beautiful orchids and giant Sequoia trees you have to admit God knows a lot about making things.
After he was fifty, one day Dad was going through the woods counting hickory trees on a plot of land and as he crossed a shallow creek he stepped onto a slick, flat rock and fell. He had a big wad of keys in his pocket and he brought 200 pounds down onto those keys and the slick rock. It broke his hip. While he was bottled up in the house healing for several weeks, he had time to think about life in general and about his own life in particular.
He didn't read much and there was no TV in those days. He was stuck—with himself. Nothing to do but think—and pray. A leading industrialist of the last century said: "I can hire a man to do anything but think." A humorist captured the idea with one word: "Thimk!" Someone said that if an average man would sit down and think ten minutes about his inevitable meeting with the living God that he would be sufficiently sobered to fall on his knees in repentance and ask God for mercy. Every time we see a tree or a flower we ought to think: "God has been here and left His footprints." Where can we go and God is not there?
The Bible includes "trees" 136 times. The first and last inclusions are:
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: (Genesis 3:2)
These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed (Revelation 11:4-5).
In the end, God is going to have His way. He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (2Peter 3:9). If He knows how to design, make, and maintain an awesome variety of trees, He also knows how to deal with us. Today He is your loving and merciful Savior. Tomorrow He will be your unbending judge who knows everything you ever did or thought.
●Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. (Psalm 116:15)
●Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11)
Prayer—Barbara Carr
Dan has talked, taught and preached the need of prayer in our lives. It is essential in our fellowship with God. We have just started reading as our morning devotional "All the Prayers of the Bible" by Herbert Lockyer. I knew there were many prayers in the Bible, but the Publisher's Foreword says that there are no fewer than 650 definite prayers and no less than 450 have recorded answers. I'm sure we will be blessed by reading this book along with the Bible.
"Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving;" (Colossians 4:2)
"Pray without ceasing." (1Thessalonians 5:17)
Our church at Flat Rock has a telephone prayer chain. When someone calls with a request, you call the next person on the list. If that person doesn't answer, you go to the next one on the list and so on. When we get that prayer call, we should stop what we are doing and pray. Don't wait until a convenient time.
Have you ever felt a burden to pray for a certain person or situation? One night my mother had gone to bed and said she felt the need to pray for her brother's children. They had been on Sand Mountain attending a family member's wedding. She told us about her burden to pray the next morning and asked if we had heard from them. We had not. The next day or two, someone called and asked if we knew that this family had had a wreck on the night in question. They had run under the rear of a truck loaded with hay. No one was hurt. We believe her prayers were answered.
Last week I read the following story which has been told by many and has been printed in missionary books. My thanks to the friend who sent it to me by email. The title is Twenty Six Men and the author is unknown.
Before I relate the story I should tell you that Urban Legends questions this story, pointing out that numerous stories have appeared over time like this one. My view is that equally convincing are the many people of sterling reputation over time who have told and written of similar things happening to them personally. Although the internet abounds with people who hijack true stories, that doesn't do away with what God does in His own way and time as often as He pleases.
There is not just one time that God answered somebody's prayer, but millions of times. There's the story of the mother awakened to pray for her son who at that moment was in a dog fight with a Russian MIG in the air over Korea.
There's the story of Dan's friend, Ida Brawl and her small children abandoned by her husband in Michigan with a snow storm moving in. Without food or wood in a cold house, she and the children knelt and told the Lord about their situation. Soon a man knocked on the door and said he was reading his paper when suddenly he was strongly overcome with the notion that she and the children needed wood and food. He stacked her porch full of wood and brought food.
There are so many stories like this that it is impossible to deny them or to rely on Snopes to give you the world-wide truth for all time in history, even though they try to do a good job of investigation.
I'm going to hold to this story and I present it to you as I found it. I believe if we could find all the stories like this, there would be…milllions of them because there have been millions of people who have called on God in times of need.
"A missionary on furlough told this story while visiting his home church in Michigan. While serving at a small field hospital in Africa, every two weeks I traveled by bicycle through the jungle to a nearby city for supplies.
"This was a journey of two days and required camping overnight at the halfway point. On one of these journeys, I arrived in the city where I planned to collect money from a bank, purchase medicine and supplies, and then begin my two-day journey back to the field hospital. Upon arrival in the city, I observed two men fighting; one of whom had been seriously injured. I treated him for his injuries and at the same time witnessed to him of the Lord Jesus Christ. I then traveled two days, camping overnight, and arrived home without incident. Two weeks later I repeated my journey.
"At this I laughed and said that I was certainly all alone out in that jungle campsite. The young man pressed the point, however, and said, 'No sir, I was not the only person to see the guards. My five friends also saw them and we all counted them. It was because of those guards that we were afraid and left you alone.' At this point in the sermon, one of the men in the congregation jumped to his feet and interrupted the missionary and asked if he would tell him the exact day that this happened.
"The missionary told the congregation the date and the man who interrupted told him this story: 'On the night of your incident in Africa, It was morning here and I was preparing to go play golf. I was about to putt when I felt the urge to pray for you. In fact, the urging of the Lord was so strong; I called men in this church to meet with me here in the sanctuary to pray for you. Would all of those men who met with me on that day stand up?' The men who had met together to pray that day stood up. The missionary wasn't concerned with who they were—he was too busy counting how many men he saw. He counted twenty six men." Ω
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