In Due Season

As hard as it may be to believe, some of my favorite gifts have been things that I have had to leave behind when we have moved.

It all began when we first moved into a historic house with giant maple trees lining the street and dotting the yard. They created a massive canopy over the lawn which we treasured. When we first moved in, two elderly sisters shuffled along the back of my new home pointing and commenting. I was painting in the living room and was startled to have people pass right by my window. Coming down from my ladder, I quickly realized that these ladies had more than a passing interest in my new abode. I set down my brush and went outside to meet them.

They told me how one of the sisters, now well into her eighties, had lived in the house for fifty years and raised eight children there as a single mother! She pointed to the trees and told me how they were gifts from her children for Mother’s Days or birthdays and how they had been planted as seedlings. These mammoth woody parasols had taken over fifty years to reach full glory. Now they represented a full and complete life to her.

We carried on her sweet tradition for birthdays and Mother’s Days. The spring David and I became grandparents, we planted our first two “grandparent” trees.” The many young trees that we watched grow over the years were difficult to leave when we moved on.

I am amazed at the growth of the trees especially when I visit a former home. It seems they grow in spurts, like our own youngsters. When they were first planted, they needed a good deal of support, structure and extra water. After infancy, the trunk needed to be bound and protected. We needed to tend to the tree and look after it much more in the beginning. It needed to take root and to grow a strong trunk. We did not expect to have huge foliage or flowers or certainly not fruit in the first several years. The tree simply needed to grow and become strong enough to support fruit and foliage. It needed a root system to support branches.

It would be odd, to say the least, to see a big shiny apple hanging from a seedling, but sometimes that is what we expect as parents. We forget that our training and disciplining and discipling of our children are processes with seasons and cycles that bear fruit in their time. We stay in the garden tenderly minding our “young shoots” until they mature into beautiful works that the Lord will continue to grow even after they are no longer home with us.

“All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” Hebrews 12:11

(Scripture memory verse from Lesson 7 of Entrusted with a Child’s Heart)