In the middle of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains is a tree, the largest in the world, estimated to be 2,800 years old, nicknamed “General Sherman.” General Sherman has a diameter at its base of 36 feet. That’s the same as if you took six people who were 6 feet tall and laid them down on the ground from head to toe. Sherman is 275 feet tall.
Not far from General Sherman is another Sequoia named “Mc Kinley” and a different part of the Sierra Nevada mountains is “General Grant” another humongous sequoia.
As you meander around the paved paths through the forest, you are struck by the burn marks on the trees which come either from natural forest fires or from controlled burns done by the forest service. They look like this:
Despite the depth and height of those burn marks, the trees keep growing. They are still alive. In many ways, this is like our lives here on Earth. If you live long enough, you will go through a trial, even a ‘trial by fire,’ – a very difficult trial. When I was 24 my fiancé was killed in a plane crash. For me, as a tree, that would be a very serious trial which did, in many ways, leave me ‘burned'. I was still alive though. When I was older and when through a particularly contentious divorce, I was burned again. When I was bullied in the workplace by a female deputy head teacher or sexually harassed by a male principal at my school, those were smaller burns, easier to deal with than the others, but still leaving me hurt, damaged, but still alive. So many people have been through these trials of fire. They’ve lost a child, or a loved one, they’ve been jilted at the altar, they can’t have kids. They feel, like this tree just below which has been so badly burnt that its core is hollow. You can see right through it to the trees behind. But…it is still alive.
We may feel a shell of our former selves after going through a trial by fire. But are we? We’re still standing tall, we’ve still got bushy tops where the birds nest. We’re still doing our daily job of exchanging carbon dioxide to oxygen. This article is for all those people who have been burned, sometimes burned very badly, by the vicissitudes of life, but are still standing tall, doing their daily jobs/ going about their daily business of exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen, doing what they can to stay alive, to grow, and eventually to make contribution to their community and their world.
Here’s another picture of a tree which is alive, but has had it’s entire inner core burned away:
Some of us are like that. We’ve been burned so badly we feel hollowed out inside. But still, we go about our daily business, exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen, offering homes to birds in the air, and in general making a contribution, all the while we don’t know how we manage to stay alive with our insides having been burnt out.
In this picture………
...the burned sequoia is so large that a large group of grown men could take shelter in it. For awhile I was this tree. Empty, charred, and barren. I don’t know how I remained standing, don’t know how I could be of any value when I felt I was dead. Eventually though, some people did come to take cover and to rest in the shelter of my burned and hollowed out life. Those people, good friends, colleagues, students, have filled my burned and charred core with new life.
Would I have chosen it that way?
Forest fires, be they natural or controlled by park rangers, are not optional for the sequoias. In fact, they are essential for the survival of the species. When there are fires, the undergrowth dies, which clears area around the sequoia. When the fire is hot enough the pregnancy pods which grown on the side of the tree break open and all the little seedlings are gently float along in the wind until they land on the ground, ready to make new sequoias.
After they are burned, sequoias keep growing. Each year General Sherman grows enough new bark to be the equivalent of a entirely new tree of a different species. So for all the people out there who have been burned, or burned to the core I say this: keep growing. Keep going in your daily job of exchanging carbon dioxide to oxygen. Keep yourself alive, ignore the burned out core and concentrate on the growing which you can do, for your own good. Keep making a contribution in whatever way to the betterment of your community and your world. In that way you will be filled again.
It may not be what you wanted, it may not be the way you imagined your tree life to be, but it is the way the forest works, it is the way God sometimes works in our lives, and it is, ultimately, God-honoring.
Be the Sequoia.
