Sequoia || Birth from the Ashes
As a kid, I had your typical irrational kid fears - monsters, losing my eyeballs, having my fingernails all fall off (you know - pretty “normal” fears). But I also had a very rational fear - fire.
I had a lot of conversations with my parents about fire safety and what we would do if our house caught fire. At field day in elementary school, the local fire department had a fire education booth. While most kids shied away so they could get their face painted and throw water balloons, I visited the firemen. They took me (and a few other curious kids) into a trailer that was made to look like a house inside. We piled into the loft and pretended to sleep, when the smoke detector went off. The trailer filled with fake smoke and we practiced opening doors, going down stairs, and escaping the impending inferno.
Twenty years later, I can distinctly remember the trailer and the carpet in the loft area where we pretended to sleep. It’s a fear that still haunts me at times today.
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But what if...fire is a good thing? What if instead of fire blazing and ruining everything by bringing it to ashes, fire brought life?
And these questions brought me right back to the sequoia (I mean come one...what is this a super tree?).
Sequoias need fire to reproduce.
I originally thought..you’re just saying that to justify why they don’t die in the forest fire. But then I watched a PBS special...and we all know PBS doesn’t lie (source).
1 - Fires make a hole in the forest.
The PBS host said that fires make a hole in the forest. At first, that made no sense to me - like okay, a hole...what good is that? But he continued by saying, these holes make space for more light and more water.
So this got me thinking..
what if the fire in my life is for more light and more water?
I hit a low point in mid-January. Some things around me set me into this hard place. My mentality was that the world around me as I knew it was burning down. How ironic….
But then I heard this fact and realized that maybe this is true for me too. Maybe the things that are burning down, were meant to burn down.
They aren’t burning for the sake of destruction, but burning to make way for provision.
2 - Fire heats the cones.
The second thing the fire does to the sequoia for regeneration is it heats up the cones without harming the tree. The cones, then open up and drop their seeds on the ground.
This fact has me thinking about Mary and her alabaster jar. I’ve talked about this story so much on here because it just tugs at my heart every time I think about it. There is a pretty distinct point in my life when Jesus used this story to have me drop my “jar” (stress, anxiety, career, etc.) at His feet (read about that here). And then, He has used that moment over and over again to show me what He could do with that jar (read about that here). The long and short of it is, He took my broken jar to make many more jars. Some are fully restored, others are still being put back together. Lately, Jesus has been showing me that He likes to fill my jars too.
What if He’s filling my jar, like He fills the sequoia’s cones with seeds? What if that means the fire is meant to heat up those jars to be emptied?
[insert complete and utter awe]
But you can’t forget the best part of the story, the fire comes to heat up the cones but without harming the tree.
3 - Fire cleans up the leaves.
The last thing fire does for regeneration is clean up the leaves on the forest floor. The seeds that dropped from the cones need bare mineral soil to grow.
Like the way file burns a hole for more light and more water, the fire burns a way for the necessary soil.
We need good soil to grow. Crappy soil makes it hard to take root and get necessary nutrients.
The fire in our lives gets right down to the good stuff - the bare mineral soil.
We can’t forget that after the fire, comes winter.
And winter brings water for us (and the seeds) to grow (read more here).
Who would have thought that there is so much to learn from a simple tree?
