I Can Still Hear The Soft Southern Wind in The Live Oak Trees
Turns out I have a favorite syrup. Sometimes I get a hankering for pancakes, but we don’t ever seem to keep syrup in the pantry, so I have to go to Kroger. Listen, I would never turn down Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth, but in Kroger a week or so ago, I realized, I like Log Cabin best. It has nothing to do with taste comparisons. It’s the log cabin. A pastor I pray with, Chris Rieber, reminded me it’s probably also the commercials from when were kids. I have always wanted to have a log cabin.
It goes way, way back. Sure, cowboy movies and Kentucky frontier history play a part; I was even lucky enough in seminary to have a job building cabins out of reclaimed frontier log cabins. It really goes back, best I can tell, to when we lived in Colorado Springs. I was in 2nd and 3rd grade. One year for my birthday or Christmas, my grandparents got me a book, Andy Russell’s “Trails of A Wilderness Wanderer.” It really spoke to me, still does. He grew up on a cattle ranch in the Canadian Rockies, was a hunting and fishing guide. I just loved the cover, and when I look at it, I think, nowadays we hunt with all sort of camo and gear and incredible optics and people spraying deer urine on their clothes, but your grandpa went out in a black and red check wool jacket and bagged more deer with an unscoped .30-30 than we will ever get. I loved the stories of the mountains… the animals, the rivers, the ranchers. Reminded me of my dad talking about being on cattle drives when he was a kid. He has some land in Costilla County, Colorado, and I guess every so often I dream of building a cabin…
Now, why do I say all this? My aunt sent me some stuff from my grandpa. His old watch. I kind of cried a little. His old belt buckle. A bunch of pictures of the family. And some letters from 10-year old me, when we moved to Germany. I guess I was pretty homesick, because there are a bunch of letters from when we first got there. I told my grandparents about our village, my German friends. There were some interesting notes in the letters, like it had snowed three times by early October, and in late November I wrote that it had snowed every day for 10 days. I thanked them for sending my cowboy boots. Yes, I wore cowboy boots and a fleece-lined jean jacket in Germany. Did not stick out at all.
Some things never change. Sometimes there is someone you love, and you have more of their traits than you know, because it has just been part of you so long. Where my people are from in Central California is really dry. It is in the rain shadow of the Santa Lucia Range. There aren’t a lot of trees. But my grandfather had a lot of trees on his ranch. Mostly oaks that came up “volunteer.” We would run drip irrigation to them and any other trees or shrubs that came up. Once when my grandfather came to visit us in Mississippi, he took back some live oak acorns and planted them. They grew too quickly in the California sun and so were very leggy. One of them had two spindly leaders, and so he braided them and joked that “one day, long after I am gone, someone will see this tree and wonder ‘what happened here?!’” That was a key attitude of his… plant trees no matter how old you are, no matter if you will never get to enjoy their fruit or shade. Maybe even because you won’t. Planting trees are a significant an investment in the future.
I was surprised to read 10-year old me ask him in a letter if he had any acorns he could send me? Maybe I thought I would not be so homesick if there were some black oaks growing around? Then it struck me. I have spent a lot of my adult life—until recently, sadly-- with some acorns, hickory nuts, or walnuts in my pocket, dropping them and heeling them in wherever I find a likely spot. I guess I did not know that it started so early… grasping this image of seed and plant and seed, seed and plant and seed, seed and plant and seed…
The parable of the sower. You guessed it. It fits perfectly with the work of evangelism, disciple-making, and church planting. Jesus tells us that three out of four times that seed is sown, it fails to grow. We have to take that seriously. A lot of church plants fail. It’s just how it is. Your disciples may start strong and fizzle out. Maybe burn out. Jesus told us sowing seed would be that way. But you keep at it. Quite a few trees I planted in Mississippi were destroyed by Katrina. But some were not. As long as they grow and produce fruit, there will be more trees come from them. The ones that grow and thrive, they produce a harvest—30, 60, even 100 times what was sown. If you just keep sowing, if you do not get discouraged, there will be a huge harvest. If you can push through the lean early days of just having a few converts, making a few disciples, planting a few churches, you will start to see the effect of exponential growth. 3 become 9 become 27 become 81 and before you know it, you can’t keep track of all the growth.
So, yeah, I have a favorite syrup. Log Cabin.