Cosmic Pruning

Rosean and I, on vacation, have been witnessing the devastating effects of the pine bark beetle on Colorado forest land. Whole mountainsides are rust colored and dying. The trees were overcrowded and weak with drought. They were not strong enough to withstand the beetle's invasion.

The overcrowding bit is at least partially our fault. We humans hate fire, and so we have not allowed the natural scourge of wildfire to thin our forests. We have also not thinned them ourselves through healthy, farsighted forestry plans. (Clear cutting timber is emphatically not such a plan.)

I have been thinking about scriptural parables of pruning and casting into the fire. Beetles are a natural thinning agency in the ongoing process of balancing the alpine ecosystem. From God's perspective everything is going just fine. There is an abundance of life amid the rust colored trees.

The question of how and when to "allow nature to take its course" is complex and fraught with emotional land mines. The issue arises everywhere -- even in our own bodies. Think about how the idea of "cure" has morphed over the past century due to the wonders of modern medicine -- which is an expensive and invasive practice.

Praising God's pruning as well as God's planting often requires we get out of our tiny human perspectives. Here's another area in which I need some Holy help.