Be a Leaf

Trees are amazing things. In every season they are beautiful, whether full of green leaves that make fat pockets of shade in the summer, or a lacework of delicate branches against the pale winter sky. They provide us with so many things that we need; lumber for buildings, fruit for food, and oxygen to keep us alive. Just about every part of a tree can help sustain and improve life in some way.

Have you ever thought about what trees eat? They don’t have mouths or teeth or tongues, but they ingest vital nutrients just like any other living thing. Trees have two intake methods.

One is kind of icky if you actually think about it. I mean, trees eat dirt. They have to be planted in it, and a little fertilizer, such as manure, goes a long way to helping most plants. They eat the messy stuff, the stuff that we would never touch, don’t want to think about, stuff little boys dare each other to smell. Everything that dies turns to dirt, and the dirt nourishes plant life. So in a way trees feed on excrement and death.

Yet trees also feed on the sun. They have to have light in order to photosynthesize. If you want a nice, shady tree, you can’t plant it in a dark room. Light is essential. Trees thrive on light. They grow tall so they can be closer to it, high above all obstructions. Yet their roots remain in the dirty ground.

Trees use dirt and light to create oxygen, which gives life to everything that breathes. God has built into His creation a special metaphor for us.

When you encounter the dirty things in life, what do you do with them? Avoid them, throw them away, or allow them to fester and poison you? When you encounter bad things, do you in turn give the world more bad things?

Yet we are Christians. We are rooted in his world, stuck on this earth with all of the badness, the excrement and death around us. But we also bask in the light. We reach up high, striving to see God, to be more like Him, to take in the good. We want the light.

It takes both dirt and light for a tree to create oxygen, that stuff that we can’t live without. We can take a lesson from the trees that sustain us. We need to check our habits, check our attitude, check our actions. What do you make of the things that life throws at you, and the grace of God? How do you put them together, and what is the end result? What do you produce to give back to the world?

I challenge you to be a leaf. In everything that comes your way, take it and turn it to good. Make something beneficial, something necessary. Let the light of God turn the bad thoughts, the painful experiences, the hurt and the fear to love, the oxygen of the soul. Be a leaf.