More about palm trees, crisis, challenges, spiritual growth and many other life´s issues

Just a few days ago I was sharing thoughts about expanding our awareness of how Mother Nature teaches us lessons on profound and sensitive human understanding of the creatures and all types of living beings linked by the unavoidable similitude and compatibility that sustain the existence and progress of the whole creation

I was specially referring myself to a royal palm tree growing up on a hot city sidewalk in Managua, Nicaragua. Then, just 2 days later, in El Salvador, I did receive from my friends a series of pictures showing the damages and desolation brought by Hurricane Ike to the City of Galveston, Texas, and interestingly enough, idyllic ones from many beautiful places around the world.

I will not say surprisingly but coincidentally in all of them royal palm trees were somehow at the center of the stage in all of them. And then again, in just another 24 hours passing lapse, invited by my oldest son to a men´s spiritual retreat, I found myself enjoying being a guest in a very special place by a lake after driving through highways, paved and unpaved roads, flanked by luxuriant vegetation and houses of every thinkable type

Comments´ sharing was abundant while passing by opulent residences, more than bungalows, where even in one of them 2 helicopters were seen parked as they were milkmen bicycles. And all this happened side by side if not on the other side of the road of humble dwellings where young and old people placidly watched us driving by on our way to the place where worship songs would resound all day long in joyful brokenness before our God, Savior and Lord.

What immediately raised my awareness of a very special coming day and impressed me the most was seeing palms after more palm trees all along the roads, as the one in my hot and humid native country.

They transmitted to my mind and my spirit the sequence of the real reason for their existence not only in the material environment but also in the spiritual one that in just some minutes would transport us both inside our inner communion with our Lord as out into the harmonious connection of the Mother Nature and its Creator.

The message was the awareness of the imperious need to transcend our tribulations, circumstances and peer pressures, paying more careful attention so we could learn the transmitted lesson that was being pounded on me by the palm trees with disregard to any specific space, time, opportunity or reason.

And I went to the internet and found myriads of reports and pictures showing palms resisting every imaginable type of adverse circumstances. And I could not do anything more than remember the male children and adolescents I had left behind.

I could not do anything more than pray all day long asking the Lord to turn them into responsible young adults and men so in their due time they could worship Him as was being done by all the males that surrounded me in that place of placid and joyful time of submission, exultation and worship.

And I kept on praying while seeing all the brokenness, the unction and the healing of so many weaknesses, afflictions and suffering that abounded all around.

My reflections from this moment on will be primordially graphic, in the hope and desire to take you through the sequence of images and sounds with this message:

Yes, it can be done! Yes, we can overcome turning ourselves into the men our present or future families need! Yes, it can be done! Nothing is impossible for God! Nothing is impossible if we walk with the Lord side by side, in a closer daily walk with Him!

Because when the storms wreck our lives?
When the hurricanes flatten down and destroy all our human deeds and little treasures?

Where could we go but to The Lord?

Give yourselves up to The Lord and turn yourselves into Palm Trees! They are not just a scenic part of idyllic scenarios!

Face the crisis as they do when the hurricanes try to bring them down!
Persevere and Survive! Even more… More than just surviving plant yourselves on your spiritual feet and conquer!
The Lord will be at your side in the crisis and He will be your strength in the Adversity and Disgrace!

Instead of resigning yourselves to be seen as the defeated and the victims change yourselves into living testimonies of His Grace and Mercy, poured upon you in the times of uncertainty, anguish and despair!

Wait upon the Lord! The time will come when you will be instead of just a promise of potentiality and growth…

You will become seeds and then ripe and luscious fruits filled with spiritual and cooling waters! As the coconuts of heavens as they are of the earth!

And then… in protective shading not only for your own blood and flesh but also for all those who will come to you as the bees come to the palm trees as the fountains of pollination and feeding!

So… in communion with God, your Creator, your Savior and your Lord, through your willing submission to Him and His Love and Discipline… !

You would be able to resist, supported by His Grace, all the hardships of life, and patiently and joyfully endure the afflicting stings of your carnal spirit and become the transforming instruments for those who will come to the shelter of your home during and after the insufferable blows of fortune or the uncontrollable breaking of the waves, the hurricanes and the storms of the worldly life!

As in Jeremiah 17: 7-8

In Jeremiah 17:5-6 The Lords says about the man who trust in mankind and forgets about Him that he will be like a bush in the desert and will live in stony wastes in the wilderness. Then, in verse 7 He blesses the man who trust Him and declares that he will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes…

Once, years ago, while in the States and involved in wonderful Christian missionary endeavors, I had the opportunity of being invited to spend a weekend in a park and we rested all day long alongside a little and placid stream, with our heads on its shore under shading trees and our feet immersed in the coolest water we could expect in that worm summertime.

I felt “so happy” as I thought that would be the way of living while obeying God! I felt so distant from the city noises and thought that you probably would have to walk the streets but from time to time you would also be able to go away from its turbulences to rest as I was doing that day. It was a bucolic image of good times and success while extending your hands and opening your heart to the sufferers, the rejected and the abused of this world.

The last 6 years, being back in our native country Nicaragua, to serve the Lord by protecting children, we lived in a traditional neighborhood, just a block away from the residence of a former President and a very neat and cozy park known as Las Palmas (THE PALMS). But the Lord sent us back to our real homes, our family ones, in a similar middle class neighborhood both in Guatemala and El Salvador.

I thought I was enjoying again being by the side of another placid stream, getting ready for future missionary tasks. I was happily proclaiming, adding somehow to the Ecclesiastes that surely there is a time to give and a time to receive, and that we were just enjoying a well deserved warriors´ rest. But the Lord had a lesson coming while forcing me to face what I thought were spiritual attacks from the world trying to destroy our family happiness and way of living.

Just a few weeks ago I had to go back and stay with another one of my sons, just two blocks away to that park but in an opposite direction to my former place. My wife and I went for a stroll in the park with my son and his little daughter. What a shock to see so much garbage around and people sitting as this were the most usual sight to enjoy.

It sure there is a time to toil and a time to rest. A time to rejuvenate your inner strength! A time to be not just a tree but a palm tree, as the name of the place we were in, and not just a run of the mill one. And will you ask me why? I did not know it then but I came to know it just one morning after while waiting to cash some dollars in that neighborhood bank.

That morning while waiting for the bank to open I sat on the border of a flower bed just in front of a palm tree. A bee tried to rest a little bit on my face and this forced me to watch the busy back and forth flying of many other ones over the clump of a luscious palm blooming patch just in front of my eyes.

A sudden revelation just shocked me out of my seat. I got my camera and in a very clumsy way tried to catch the busy paths of the bees, and I realized that you can be like a tree in the midst of the noisy sidewalks of the streets, if you thirstily drink from the living waters of the Lord.

I realized that your destiny as a Christian is to become a blooming patch in such a palm tree to let the little bees of this world suck away the rejuvenated strength of your inner self so the former bees you nourished and the ones to come can become in time newer palm trees of the mercy of the Lord.

God is such a Friend besides being your Savior and your Lord that He never allows the “refining fire” of His allowed tests to burn you down to useless ashes. He invites you to walk through thunder, fire and floods, so you can walk over this world burning coals purifying your heart so you later on can show His Divine Character through you.

You don´t need the flowing waters of the worldly success, even in well intentioned Christian feats! If you dream of becoming a huge and luxuriant tree for all the bystanders to see, peacefully lying down with your feet in the cooling waters of recognition and respect, He will shake you off, trim you down, taking you to the hot sidewalks of the streets, to strengthen you and revitalize your inner self.

He will do it to show you that you can be a living palm tree for the bees to come and take away the honey of your hope and trust in Christ so they can soothe their hurting throats for being the little and the despised ones of this world.

He will do it so you can brighten the face and bring out the smiles of the expectant ones who applaud the nonsensical gibberish of the wandering clowns while dispiritedly keep on seeking an still uncertain path to any type of future...

as well as to encourage all those who have almost given up and have resigned themselves to live amongst the garbage and the filthy debris strewn around even in the coziest parks by the spoilers, the braggarts, the trashers and the insensitive abusers of this world.