Lucas and I sat out on the porch with hammer and screw driver in hand. “LaLa, what’s does the middle of the acorn see look like?” Good question Lucas. I was curious too. So we began gathering acorns from the thousands that lay in our yard just waiting to break open and bud into a new acorn tree for our front yard. Now before you begin feeling sorry for the myriad of squirels that scurry up and down our trees because Lucas and I are cutting into their nut supply, Don’t! When I say we have thousands of acorns littering our front yard, I am being literal. We have around 30 acorn trees that have budded from these tiny seeds. We had to trim them out this year because of the storms that sweep through our state during spring. If the trees aren’t strong enough, the winds of storms break them and they come crashing down on our house or onto our daughters car. Trust me there is no damage done in Lucas and I collecting our own stash of acorns from the ecosystem around our home.
Lucas takes the hammer and breaks open the outer shell of the acorn and then takes the screwdriver to cut away to the core of the nut. I watch fascinated because of the originality of my grandson.
A key verse in the new study, “The Broken Way,” by Ann VosKamp is John 12:24, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single see. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
I see the truth of this statement as I look out my window to my neighborhood.
Those trees that shade my neighborhood and keep us cool in the summer time grew because of the millions of acorn seeds that fell upon good soil and broke apart to become a tree.
Last spring Kevin and I hauled away 10 truck beds of acorn seeds from the deck of our lake house. (Well, truth be known, it was mainly KEVIN doing all the work, but I watched a lot.) We threw them into the back of our utility vehicle and took them out to the woods where it did not matter if one more acorn tree grew. We had to do this because it was like walking on marbles across our deck that was 4 inches deep with acorns.
“God has planted eternity in the human heart.” Eccl 3:11
Our hearts are just like our deck and our front yard. They are littered with things that want to choke out the Eternity that God has planted in each of us. Sometimes you just have to clear out the clutter so that the one true seed that produces a strong eternal tree will grow and produce fruit in your life.