God's Unrecognized (at the time) Blessings

              Sandy Dickson

When I first moved into my house, I was thankful for the huge 100-year-old silver maple tree in the front yard. It was close enough to the house to offer very ample and comforting shade in the summer.

In the fall, the silver leaves turned various shades of oranges, yellows and reds. I was never big on raking, but to look at the bright side, the autumn leaves could be used to mulch the flower beds.

Besides that, I think squirrels are darling and they are fun to watch. I also recognized that the tree was host to various feathered friends
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In the breeze, the leaves softly whispered a calming lullaby.

One day a few years after I had lived in the house, I was shocked to see a pile of sawdust along the base of the tree. It looked as though someone had been sawing at a branch directly above it, but the branches were in tact.

Baffled, I stood back and watched the nearest place where the branch directly above the sawdust connected to the trunk. To my surprise, I saw a piece of sawdust flying out about every three seconds.

Oh, no—that has to mean carpenter ants, I thought!

As much as I hated to, I called a local tree care place for a prognosis on the extent of infestation, the possibility of killing the ants and saving the tree.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. The tree was full of the little varmints that had eaten tunnels in so much of the tree, it was recommended to be cut down. The first tree place gave me a price of $5000. The same tree surgeon said if I wanted to save money, they could trim the most threatening parts, but I saw that as only prolonging the inevitable with me having to deal with cutting it down later anyway, but not relieving the worry of it falling. Since the tree loomed so close to the house, the best thing to do, as much as I hated it, was to get rid of the whole tree, whose largest branch hovered directly over my bedroom!

The man said if the tree fell, it would flatten my two-story house all the way down to the ground. He said it was the largest maple tree he had ever seen. When I stood and put my arms around it, my finger tips only reached to the middle of the truck on each side.

With enough estimates, I was able to get it down for $2100, by the time I had to pay the extra $200 to have them dig out the roots and take away the mulch. It was a sad thing to have the beautiful tree gone that didn’t look from the outside that anything was wrong with it.
I thought I could at least have a few slices of wood to make a set of sentimental shelves about the size of a file cabinet. The tree man was going to take the tree to a man who would cut me some boards to make that happen.

Surprisingly, even the huge trunk was so hollowed out it reminded me of the inside of a dugout canoe. There wasn’t enough wood to accommodate the making of a shelf or even salvaging anything that could be useful.

I miss that tree. I miss its beauty, its shade and all the squirrels that played there. But here’s what I think about the situation now.

Every time we have a high wind, I don’t have to worry about whether or not the tree will fall on the house. The last two storms were so powerful within a week apart of each other, a huge amount of trees blew down and even two weeks later, the area still hasn’t recovered or been entirely cleaned up.

I’d have worried about the tree in each wind and would go so far as to say it probably wouldn’t have fared through any high winds, especially in lieu of how hollowed out it was. So now instead of bemoaning the loss, I thank God for sending the carpenter ants.

All this to say that God sees the bigger picture and even when things happen that we don’t like at the time, it often paves the way to something that He knows in His bird’s eye view we will need further down the line. I’d much rather have my house than my tree and I think that if the carpenter ants hadn’t necessitated that the tree be dispensed with, would now have neither.