If you have ever sipped an aged wine, or received good advice from your grandpa you already know that somethings get better with age! The aging process is usually slow....and although most of us are prone to impatience there are some things in life you just can't rush. I give you roast beef for example....or today's photo subject: TREES And as Horatius Bonar points out below, there are a few other good things, like a tree, that don't happen overnight.
The first thing I saw at Holden Arboretum was this display of a section of a coastal Redwood tree. Below is a photo of the plaque explaining the tree's approximate age, and the historical events that occurred during the life of the tree. The diameter on this thing was so large I couldn't stretch my arms wide enough to touch the outsides with my fingertips. Amazing!
(As an aspiring dendrochronologist, I jokingly point to my "birthdate" on the tree rings. Thought I would include it so you could get a sense of the size of it as a whole, and better appreciate the close up shots I took of the thin growth rings, each representing a year of the tree's life).
**NOTE: Dendrochronology is the fancy word for the scientific method of dating based on patterns in tree rings....impress your friends and work that into a sentence!
**NOTE: Dendrochronology is the fancy word for the scientific method of dating based on patterns in tree rings....impress your friends and work that into a sentence!
As the plaque states, this tree was about 882 years old when it was cut down in 1978, but could have lived 2000 years! That means there are trees on this planet that were beginning to grow when Christ walked the earth. Let that blow your mind!
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| Redwood rings upclose |
By Horatius Bonar: “God’s Trees Grow Slowly”
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| A cedar tree growing in the park |
God’s processes are not always rapid. His greatest works rise slowly. Swiftness of growth has been one of man’s tests of greatness; not so is it with God. His trees grow slowly; the stateliest are the slowest. His creatures grow slowly, year by year; man, the noblest, grows the most slowly of all. God can afford to take His time. Man cannot; he is hasty and impatient…. He forgets how slowly the palm tree and the cedar grow. They neither spring up in a night nor perish in a night… He insists that, because it is God’s purpose that His saints should be holy, therefore they ought to be holy at once.
It is true that our standard is, and must be, perfection; for our model is the Perfect One. But the question is, "Has God in scripture anywhere led us to expect the rapidity of growth, the quick development of perfection in which some glory and because of the confessed lack of which in others they look down on these others as babes or loiterers? Is there in scripture any instance of a PERFECT MAN, excepting Him who was always and absolutely without sin?
