When I was a small child, I visited the Redwood State Park in California. My dad’s last posting in the Army was to Ft. Lewis Washington–for one year. We lived in Virginia. So my dear, dear parents decided to make trekking across the country into an adventure. I don’t remember everything we did, but thankfully, my mom took hundreds of pictures.
Redwoods and Sequoias are huge. They are also old.
It takes a sequoia tree 250 years just to grow into a decent-sized tree. It is still considered “young” at this stage.
At 500-750 years, a sequoia reaches its ‘adult’ height.
Old things haunt me. I have always been fascinated by history. Echoes of things and times that I have never seen and can only barely imagine fill me with a sense of weight. It’s the same feeling I get when I stare at the ocean. Civilizations rise and fall, wars are fought, people are born, grow up, and die–and still the tide goes in and out and the waves lap gently on the beach.
Eternity is frightening. But eternity is also a source of hope.
In a song from his latest album, “Peopled with Dreams,” artist John Mark Mcmillan has a song titled, “The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds”. In it, he muses on life, suffering, and the place of God in it all. But it’s the last chorus that always strikes me–so much so that I have it taped to my desk at school:
“So shall I plant sequoias, and revel in the soil
Of a crop I know I’ll never live to reap?
Then sow my body to my Savior
And my heart unto my Maker
And spread me on the road, the rocks, and the weeds.”
If you plant a sequoia seed, you won’t live to see it become a tree. You won’t live to see anything start to sprout from the ground. You will live your entire life by faith, believing that the seed is still alive, watering and taking care of it, trusting nature to take its course–even after you are gone.
What does it mean to live your life, knowing you won’t see everything–maybe not anything–that you’ve dreamed come to pass?
What does it mean to plant sequoias?
I am, by nature, an impatient person. Especially if I know exactly where I want to go, or what I want to do. I don’t deal with roadblocks well.
But the Bible is full of stories that all teach the same thing: you have to wait to see a promise fulfilled. And sometimes, you might have to live and die not seeing the end of what was promised.
In Hebrews 11, there is a list of people known as “heroes of the faith”. These are people that are rightly praised for living lives that honored God and showed trust in Him. It closes with this sobering note, however:
“All of these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers in their own country.”
Teaching, I have found, is like planting sequoias.
You pour as much as you can into the children you teach. Manners and grammar, spelling and social skills, compassion and comprehension. I want my students to learn better English, but I also want them to learn to be good people. To “be brave, tell the truth, and never get up”–a line from our daily Code. Most important, I try to teach them about God, and how much they need Him.
But you don’t know if those lessons stick, sometimes. It can seem a long while before change occurs, especially with the ones that most need love.
There are days that I’m metaphorically staring at the ground, knowing that I’m not likely going to see my “seeds” start coming up any time soon. I won’t know the impact that some chance remark I made had on a student. I won’t know if my efforts helped or hindered some.
And the planter won’t know if his sequoia ever grows tall.
So why “plant sequoias”?
Because it shows your faith. It shows that you believe in something greater and more grand than the scope of your seventy/eighty/ninety years on this earth. It means you are investing in something with the same trust as those in Hebrews 11–that even if you don’t see the promise come true right now, it will come to pass.
And nothing will be wasted.
“Meaningless, meaningless–everything is meaningless!” says the writer of Ecclesiastes.
He was right, after a fashion. So many of the things we chase are like the sand on the beach–easily knocked down and swept away.
Yet we long to do something that lasts. We want to plant sequoias.
We have mortality in our bones, but eternity in our hearts.
Why?
So that we may seek the one who made us–the author of all that lasts.
“Shall I plant sequoias? And revel in the soil
Of a crop I know I’ll never live to reap?”
Yes.
Because when you sow your body to your Maker, you trust God with the result of your sacrifice.
Right now, it’s easy to feel like the world is one big mess, and everything keeps getting worse. Our lives feel small and powerless.
Plant sequoias, anyway. Trust that the one who wrote your dreams will not let them shrivel up and die. Trust Him for the process.
When you are connected to God and His plans, you can know that your dreams and desires will not turn up void.
It’s a balancing act–humility and vision. Humility to know that I can’t accomplish anything without God, and vision to know that with Him, through Him, I can accomplish anything.
As I started this year, I felt a stirring in my heart that 2021 would be a year of return for me, personally. Specifically, a return to joy and passion. The last two years have been hard and involved a lot of growing. It felt like a lot of the passion I once had has become dry and small.
I want to plant sequoias. I want to dream again.
And so, I plan to spend this year investing in the lives God has placed in front of me. I also plan to spend it writing a book–several books–and delivering on a dream I’ve had for a long time.
Most important, I want to better know God, and through that know myself and who I was made to be.
May I be spread out on the road, the rocks, and weeds this year–a testimony to my Maker.
Teach; Think; Write. 