Life-Giving Monuments

Trees are monuments of intentional creation and beauty. Tilting my head back and soaking in the color, texture, and shape of such a creation through my mixed brown eyes has been a more astonishing experience lately. Existing in another part of the world can mean a change in climate where tree varieties are much different. Except for the Jasmine bush in the corner of the campus at Bangla Hope, Bangladesh was full of exotic varieties: banana, coconut, mango, papaya, mahogany, and many shade trees which were almost always covered in a layer of dust.

Coming home to the lush Pacific Northwest I am captivated by the juxtaposing in my mind between my two homes and their native greenery. Standing on a steep hillside in Washington at the foot of a wide jagged wall of rough rock I turned South and drank deep of nature.

A carpet of fingered ferns bowed in reverence to the majestic splendor of the uniformed fir trees as they stood guard on the hillside against the white-capped waters of the broad Columbia River. A beautiful spray of sunlight speckled the bowed foliage through the thick branches above.

Trees are life-giving! They are an intentional creations of service! All of creation is breathing out carbon dioxide and trees are soaking it in and giving us life in oxygen. Life-giving monuments to the
Creator who takes our bad and breathes life into the lowest of places.

 "There was no doubt which was more like Love Himself. Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He is to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too."

 (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves) 

And the tree stands strong and firm pointing up, always up reminding all of creation where beauty had its start and where Love reigns.

May I drink in nature as an act of worship to the One who gives life and may I in turn be a creation of intentional growth towards Jesus, pointing to Jesus, always up.