needles and leaves

I was thinking about the difference between hardwood trees that lose their leaves before winter and pine trees, that keep their needles.  Apparently, the broad surface and thin construction of a leaf doesn't lend itself to winter survival as well as the skinny and hard surfaced pine needle.  They both have the same function of creating food for the tree through the mixture of sun and air but the pine needle is designed to weather the severest winter.   Pine needles are also covered with a hard, waxy, skin to protect the food manufacturing cells within and their design allows them to hold lots of snow without breaking off.  In fact, a pine needle may live for about ten years before falling to the forest floor and being replaced.  A typical pine tree might have seven million pine needles!  The pine tree sacrifices the glory of fall color to remain fully clothed through winter.   I suppose people can be something like hardwood trees and pine trees.  Some are more dramatic and openly display the issues of life, as the hardwood tree shows its leaves moving from buds of early spring through the vitality of summer and then transforming brilliantly before dying as winter approaches.  Others are quieter and less prone to change, as the evergreen tree with the same needles and the same color throughout the year.   The designs of hardwood tree and pine are two different ways of coping with similar life challenges.

We have different ways of surviving the winters of life.  There is one approach, marked by great visible change and there is another approach, marked by little outward change.  Pine and hardwood can coexist in the same forest.  It helps for us to appreciate the different designs of others around us as we move through the challenges of winter.

1 Corinthians 12:¹² For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. ¹³ For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.¹⁴ For in fact the body is not one member but many.  

blessings,

Rob Smith