A warm summer day…
Blue skies, light winds, a few clouds…
The only sound? Rustling leaves…
Leaves at the top of the nine large elm trees in the yard…
Reaching up seventy or eighty feet, the trees are taller than any building in the small town…
They are twice as tall as the four-story skyscraper where my grandfather works…
“Those trees must have been here forever.” thinks my seven year old brain….
Surely they will stay here forever…
As will my grandfather’s office building…
As will the house where my mother has lived since she was four, and my family then lived with my grandfather…
That summer, the leaves on the trees started to turn yellow before fall arrived.
The grown-ups were worried…
“Dutch Elm Disease”, they said.
The next year the city sprayed the trees, but within a few years, they had all died…
Nine permanent Elms were gone from our yard…
Hundreds more vanished from the town…
One of the three permanent structures in my seven year-old mind had disappeared…
Still our house and the local skyscraper stood.
Today, the ‘skyscraper’ is a parking lot…
And the house?
As I grew up, I was sure the house would not only survive, but be a permanent part of our family…
It had to survive.
It had become the repository of generations of family history…
Marriage certificates, family Bibles, death certificates, prized possessions of relatives…
They all made their way into my grandfather’s hands and into our house as relatives died.
When I grew up I would move back into that house and carry on his tradition, I vowed.
The house would continue in our family forever…
I haven’t lived in that house or my hometown since I graduated from high school.
The house still stands but somebody else owns it now…
The lessons to be learned?
Be careful what we classify as permanent …
I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty. Revelations 1:8
Be careful from whom or what we seek our strength…
The eternal God is your refuge Deuteronomy 33:27
For only when we put our faith in God, can we find the permanent foundation from which we can draw the the strength to …
… be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:58
