All or Nothing

Every winter in Paraguay select trees undergo a transformation: their owners trim them back.  By 'trim them back' I mean hack off every small limb and drag off every sign of life until all that is left to behold is a trunk with several bare appendages protruding.  I remember our first term we had a Sombra de la Playa (Beach Shade) tree in our yard.  It was a brilliant tree, the leaves were as thick as leather and grew so dense that... well, it could have provided shade even on a beach.  Having heard something of the annual custom, and wanting to fit in culturally, I asked my gardener to trim back our tree.  He climbed up into the tree barefoot wielding nothing but his machete and went to work.  I almost cried when I saw the end result.  For the following months I had a pit in my stomach each time I looked at the bare stump where life once had flourished- 'he killed my tree!'  Certain trees are trimmed back in this way each year in Paraguay so as to prevent them from growing too large thus overtaking other trees or structures and to allow sunlight to penetrate during the colder months.

 

This past week I asked my friend, Pedro, if he could trim our two beautiful Lluvia de Orquideas (Rain of Orchids) trees.  Now, with a little more experience under my belt I asked him if he could trim them 'half-way'!  In response to this request my gardener friend looked perplexed and rattled something off in Guarani that I didn't catch.  I thought to myself surely Pedro will see that 'half-way' is a reasonable alternative to either 'kill my tree' or 'have it overgrow my house'.  So I asked the same question again conveniently ignoring the fact that I didn't understand what he had said, "So, do you think you could cut them back like, half-way?"  Pedro looked up into the tree with a concerned expression on his face- obviously envisioning the task I was asking him to do for me.  He explained to me, "Dan, the tree's just too big."  This time I understood: the branches were too long for him to safely climb out on without them breaking under his weight.  We'd either have to leave the trees as they were or give them the traditional Paraguayan trim.  It was all or nothing.

We're finding that ministry can also be like this in Paraguay.  Youth leader trainings have been painfully slow (for us) to get started back up after Christmas break.  We have been languishing through a season where sometimes it feels as if nothing is happening.  The truth is that when you're in the proverbial winter months of ministry and all you have to look at is a seemingly lifeless form that once gave you so much joy, it's hard not to be discouraged.

I clearly remember one Spring day, some years ago, when to my amazement I spotted a bud protruding from one of the hacked stumps on that Sombra de la Playa tree.  I ran into the house shouting to Sarah, "Come here, you've got to see this!"  I made my whole family look at that ridiculous sprout because it meant that what I thought was a lost cause was actually just waiting for the right time to blossom and that what was an eye sore to us would become beautiful again.  It meant that what I thought was dead was actually just dormant!  Within just a month that tree had thousands of thick leaves again and all evidence that it had been trimmed was gone.  Our experience in ministry tells us too that times of seeming nothingness are just a season and things will pick up again.   In fact I expect that soon enough we will be so busy we may be struggling to keep up with all the ministry opportunities.  It may even be that 'trimming back' our ministry is actually for the best and both the seasons of 'all' and the seasons of 'nothing' are from the Lord's hand.