Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments! His offspring will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house, and his righteousness endures forever. [Psalm 112:1-3 (ESV)]
When walking in the swamp, I often see what are known as “nursery logs.” After a tree dies, its roots eventually decay and it falls to the ground, leaving an opening in the forest’s canopy for sunlight to reach down to the forest floor. The dead tree’s raised trunk becomes a nursery for new plant life as seeds fall on it and take root. Its bark holds moisture, providing young plants with water, and the decaying wood provides them with decades of rich organic nutrients. Starting with moss and ferns, vegetation grows and flourishes in the patch of light left by the tree’s demise. These nursery logs become gardens of new life and can contain five times more living matter than they did when alive! Eventually, a new tree will take root in the remains of the old one and the cycle of life continues for another generation. Supposedly, it will take about the same number of years for a tree to decompose as it took to live. Considering that trees can live several hundred years, one dead tree can leave quite a legacy.
I thought of those nursery logs today while reading an obituary in our local paper. Like the trees, this man may be dead but, most definitely, he is neither gone or forgotten. Here are just a few of the loving words written about him:
He touched the lives of everyone he came in contact with…after talking to him for two minutes he would immediately become your friend…would do anything to help someone in need…always had a positive attitude and was ready to listen if you needed to talk…a great man who was loved by all his family and friends and will be missed dearly…he would say love unconditionally, don’t hold grudges, and never walk away mad… tomorrow isn’t promised so make the best of today so you have no regrets…know you are right with God…remember [him] as the man who always made the most of life and always had a smile on his face.
I never met this man and consider it my loss that I didn’t. I have no idea the size of his financial holdings but, based on his career as a fishing guide, I suspect he was not a wealthy man. He was, however, an incredibly rich one! Whether or not he left his family with any money, his bequest of love, faith and joy, as seen in a life well lived, makes them more than rich.
While it is our belief in Jesus that gives us eternal life in our heavenly home, like the nursery logs in the forest, even dead, we can still persist. Once we’ve fallen to the forest floor, we continue to nourish life if the lives we touched while living were touched with faith, love, generosity, compassion and joy. Unlike the cypress trees, we may only be blessed with seventy to eighty years but, if wisely lived, think how that legacy can grow as each life we touched touches another. As did this man, we can leave a patch of sunlight when we fall, our example can provide a base for young seedlings, and the memory of us can bring nourishment to hungry souls.
Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. [Albert Einstein]
“A Christian doesn’t die,” declared the pastor, which may have been news to some of those attending the Celebration of Life. “He just moves!” the minister added as an explanation. Indeed, we are just temporary residents here on earth. Death for a Christian is simply a relocation and, unlike most moves we’ve made, it doesn’t require a purging of the items in the attic, garage sales, packing up boxes, or wrangling friends into helping us carry the heavy stuff! This is one transfer that neither requires moving vans nor mail forwarding.
For two years, I was part of a women’s ministry. One of its purposes was to host a web site for twelve Christian writers. We were a diverse multi-generational group and the site offered hyperlinks to our individual blogs. All were women who felt they’d been called by God to expand His kingdom through their writing. We regularly shared our prayer concerns with one another and a month rarely passed without one or more women requesting prayers for their writing or asking for divine inspiration. Sadly, the ministry disbanded this past year, in great part due to the lack of writing by most of the authors.
“We covet your prayers,” said the new pastor. This was the second time in two weeks I’d heard someone say they coveted my prayers and the phrase bothered me. For more than twenty-five years, I recited “Thou shalt not covet” as part of the Communion liturgy, so coveting anything speaks of sin to me. Granted, neither speaker was expressing a desire for my spouse, home or donkey; nevertheless, the phrase touched a nerve. If coveting is a sin, why did these men (both pastors) say they coveted my prayers?
Devotions of the Heart 