There are two pear trees that frame the path to the back door of the old house. When we first walked the property, before we knew that caretaking of it was to be in our future, I noticed their presence. That was February and the sap of those trees had retreated to the heart of oldest wood, waiting for warmer spring weather to send it to the tips of the branches. In February, the tree was barren and I don’t know how much you know of pear trees, but you don’t have a pear tree in your year for its beauty. As they grow older, they become gnarly. To look at them they seem unruly and unkempt. The bark is likely to be cracked and hard looking with new growth branches coming out at all places. The silhouette of a pear tree against the winter sky looks messy and unplanned. I don’t know how old these trees are, but certainly they are old enough to be about as tall as the house, at least those barren branches in February were…
Right before spring, my friend John took inventory with me. He noticed that the pear trees grew beneath the shadows of the stately old and full bodied pine trees and he wondered out loud if there was enough sun for them to bear fruit. I worried for the next two months whether his concern would prove true. All the fruit bearing pear trees I had seen stood out in fields alone, commanding the area around them, sharing sunlight with little else. These were even planted north of the house, the angle of the winter sun required the trees compete for sun from even the old house. By March, fat little round buds covered the trees and within a week they had turned into white petaled flowers. I couldn’t smell them, no sweet odor wafted through the greening branches, but the bees and fruit wasps knew they were there. If gentle south winds, which seem to prevail on this rolling landscape, didn’t jiggle the leaves, the insects sure did. Thousands tasted pear nectar and brushed their pollen dusted legs and bodies into flower upon flower upon flower as they busily harvested from the tree. As is the plan for pear trees, they pollinated those thousands of flowers. I might not have been able to smell what the bees and wasps could, but I could hear them at their work. A thousand tiny little sounds made one sound loud enough for human ears. By April the small white petals floated to the ground and we trampled then as we toiled around and in the house. Roots deep into sandy loam soaked up nutrients natural to the ground and aided by us, and within days, small, hard, tiny pears covered the trees. I watched them swell.
I have watched those two trees change as the fruit they bear matures. With branches that were once upright and reaching for the sky, each now are labored and weighed down with at least a dozen pears, heavier as each day goes by, the branches they are being nourished from, bowing more and more. Some threaten to brush the ground. Yesterday I sat in a chair for a moment of thought about twenty feet from those trees. I wanted to think, to be honest I felt the need to pray. With a mind that has been unsettled and restless of late, my thoughts and life has pointed me to how many plans of mine are too much about the future, and not enough about the day I am living. And those pear trees were making me more restless. I needed to make a decision, when was I supposed to know when to harvest those pears, the precise moment that they were ready to make the preserves for Josh and the mincemeat for John, but not too late that those severely arcing branches would break under my careless attention.
I looked up at the sky and in that quiet voice that God always uses with me (don’t worry yet, I didn’t actually HEAR Him, He speaks through the voice of my heart), He said this to me.. “Janet, why are you worrying about those old pear trees? I have been taking care of those trees for a lot longer than you’ve been looking at them. I made them so their branches can bend way more than you think possible. I made them just the way they should be. They can do the job. You go ahead and make plans for the fruit they will bear, but today, why don’t you sit there and think about how they might not be the prettiest tree on the place, but they might be one of the most resilent. They are strong. They are doing today just what I created them to do.”
I think I am a little like those pear trees. Today, I am going to do just what God intends for me to do today, what He created for me to do. Like those pears, I am going to grow this day, take advantage of the Son. This Happy Monday, I hope you do too.
Bible verse of the day: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is life not more important than food and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life.
Matthew 6:25-27 NIV
Quote for the day: It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time. ~ Winston Churchill
