New Life

Last night I laid awake for hours and during that time a picture of a tree came to mind with a spiritual illustration. At first I saw a mature tree standing as just a trunk with no appearance of life and I thought of a person without Christ. But then buds began pop through the bark and gradually little limbs with leaves began to grow and after a while blossomed out to form a nice top for the once, seemingly, lifeless trunk sticking out of the ground. For me this was an illustration of what happens when Christ comes into our life and we are born again. But let us start at the beginning.

Back in the spring of 2007, I was doing a prayer walk at HUST - short for Huaghong University of Science & Technology – and noticed that a new building was under construction behind a row of mature trees located along the sidewalk, paralleling a road. It was obvious that the limbs would be in the way and I wondered what they might do to solve the problem. A few days later I was there again walking along being observant, which is an important feature of prayer walking, and found workers with chain saws, cutting off all the limbs leaving only a row of big trunks; something I have never seen done before. This really caught my attention.

Several weeks later I ventured back there again, of course to pray, to see if there was any life or did we still have a row of trunks; like a row of people without Christ. I looked real close and saw new life popping out in various places as shown in the picture below, taken May 2007.

I went back a month later, before returning to America, and was encouraged. It is like, well, this row of spiritually dead people coming to life in Jesus Christ and are busy growing.

I waited for a year to go by before taking another picture and then on April 2008 I got the picture shown next.

I thought, “This row is looking pretty good!” as the tops were beginning to fill out pretty well. I wondered what another year would do and waited until April 2009 to take the next picture.

Now that is impressive! Let us give it another year, which brings us to today of April 2010.

The top seems a little thinner and farther up from the ground than in the last picture. On closer examination I find another spiritual lesson. As we learn from John 15, our Father is busy pruning our lives so that we will produce more fruit. Workers has come along and cut out many of the branches leaving only a few bigger ones to develop, as seen in the next picture.

As these new branches grow they will tend to stay away from the building or can be easily trimmed back, where the old limbs were in the way of the building being built and to keep the tree in balance the whole top was cut off so it could start over. Now there is yet another application. As believers, sometimes our whole top gets nearly cut off and we think we can’t go on, but our tree would tell us, “Don’t give up in despair. Look and move ahead and see what happens.”

For me these trees are a reminder of all the spiritually dead students walking around campus, who need spiritual life. Those who find new life and show evidence of it, like the trees, will experience God’s discipline to learn obedience. Throughout their life, the Father continue to prune to obtain more fruit. That is why I am here looking at trees and praying. The trees remind me of what prayer can do for some of these students. How about you? Is the top to your trunk filling out, well, like the tree featured above?