Covering More Ground in Your Life

I was woken up this morning by a crew of men coming over to my house to remove a couple of 80 foot ash trees. There is a beetle having their way with these trees and it is unfortunate that they must come down, but such is life.

 before

However, the point of my blog is different than that of the trees. While I was watching the trees be cut down, I noticed how much shade they offered. At 9 in the morning, it covered about 200-250 feet of grass with shade. Slowly as they began to remove its branches and limbs, it was left to a single trunk and it cast a very small shadow. When they did the same thing to the second tree, where there had been a huge area of shade, now there was almost none.

 after

That's when I really saw something in my life.

I saw the tree as being a person in a community, or as myself. No matter how thick the trunks were on that tree, it could never cover the area it did without its branches. Then, the branches would not be able to cover the area it could without its leaves. Yet there are more leaves than branches, and more branches than the a trunk of a tree.

Too many times in my life have I wanted to be a big thick trunk. But trunks can't cast a big shadow unless they branch out, and then they cover more ground.

I saw the parallel in my life that I rarely ask for help. I remain a trunk in my life trying to do it myself, rather than branching out and asking for help because it impacts more people who want what you've got.

Hmmmmmmmmm...

It's amazing that I saw that today. A couple years ago, I would have just seen 2 trees being cut down...