June 2, 2005
Limb Lesson
Today Paw-paw asked me to climb a tree and saw off a limb for him. The ladder, fully extended, reached up about 20 feet but still fell six feet short of where the limb was on the tree. I dislike heights. But after I got the right footgear I ascended the ladder and reached for a fork in the tree where I could pull myself up to rest in safety and eliminate that bothersome limb. As the ground swayed below, or maybe it was the tree I was clinging to, I suddenly wished I had asked for authorization to abscond from this arduous arbor-axing assignment, leaning toward longing for leave from limb-loping, and believing it better to be basking in the Bahamas than bisecting branches. But I made it to where I needed to be and sawed the designated bough. It was then that Paw-paw yelled from the ground that he had good news for me. “What’s that?” I asked. “I only have one more branch up there for you to cut off,” he said. Great. Another one. Well, I was already up the tree and certainly wasn’t going to get all the way down just to have to climb it another day. “Get the one a couple more feet up, around the other side of the tree,” he instructed me. My arms had serious bark imprints from my sudden initiation into the tree-hugger clan by the time I successfully severed that sucker. Anna held the ladder while I climbed back down, telling Paw-paw that “a little terror does a body good.” He agreed, noting that it “keeps the adrenaline glands in working order.” Thus ended my tree-pruning adventure, hopefully the last time I will need to climb that high in a tree for years to come.
But it struck me that I might not have made the attempt at all if Paw-paw had revealed from the beginning that he had two limbs for me to remove, one “high up” and one “waaay high up.” I might have looked at the higher limb and judged it too lofty (literally) a job for such as myself. His decision to withhold certain pertinent details until I actually needed to know them speaks to me of his wisdom. I wonder sometimes if God does the same. “Trust me,” He says, and only shows us what is directly in front of us. Perhaps if we knew the long road ahead and the hard times to come we would lose heart and not try at all. Perhaps, when we reach the point where our sight fails and He finally reveals the next step, what formerly seemed insurmountable suddenly looks conquerable.
Written at 4:46 pm
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Filed under: General, Learnings
8 Comments
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Methinks you just wrote that to practice your vocabulary.
June 3rd, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Could be, my friend. That could be. I find myself visiting thesaurus.com frequently these days. :-)
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:25 pm
*chuckle* Go alliteration. ;)
Not one for heights? How are you at flying?
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:30 pm
Whoa. That was some heavy-duty alliteration….
June 4th, 2005 at 10:49 am
Ah, alliteration: an amiable and attractive, yet always apposite, aquaintence.
Re: heights. Above 80 or 100 feet above the ground height seems to lose its scare power. It’s those thirty-foot drops that make me tremble.
June 4th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
James, you can be a real geek sometimes.
*resists the urge to alliterate*
Why should thirty foot drops bother you, but 100 foot drops not? Seems to me the higher you are, the more certainty of a… less than pleasant landing. Ahem.
June 6th, 2005 at 12:06 am
No, he’s right… I don’t like heights either, but to me, while certainly not preferable to numerous other activities, jumping out of an airplane with a parachute sounds better than being at the top of a tall tree, swaying among the thin upper branches. And the ground doesn’t look so scary when you’re at 30,000 feet either. (Though I’d probably be rather freaked out if I was clinging to the wing or something).
And I remember being up with my dad in the cage of a self-propelled boom lift machine… it was a 60 foot boom – we had very tall trees. That was really scary… being suspended 60 feet up in the air in a little cage, and when dad would move the whole machine to reposition while we were still in the air, a three inch depression in the ground would cause us in the cage to sway 10 feet, or so it felt. I was sure it was going to overbalance and we would go all the way over. I’ve never been so freaked out by heights before. And I’ve climbed some pretty tall trees and been on some really high amusement park rides. (Though there was the orbiting Sky Cabin at Knotts Berry Farm that freaked me out when I was a kid, but I went on it again when I was older [somewhat recently] and it was no problem.)
June 7th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Thank you for backing me up, Courtney. I really couldn’t agree more. I love flying. Well, I mean I don’t avoid it. It’s not like I go out of my way to board airplanes, but I certainly have no fear of them. Heights like that are lovely; what a view! But swaying precariously in a tree as though I were some furry oak-dweller? Let’s not.
Once one reaches a certain height, it becomes a fact that traveling any higher will undoubtedly incur no greater damage to one’s person were one to plummet to the terrestrial surface far below. So what difference does it make? I’d much rather fall from 10,000 feet and have a fun adrenaline rush on the way down than fall 400 feet with the same result but less time to enjoy the trip.