The first time I got asked why some people paint the bottom of a tree trunk white was my first mission trip to Mexico during my freshman year of college. I don’t think I knew the answer then and I’m still not sure if I know the answer. Google says everything from “to keep insects away” to “so the tree doesn’t get a sunburn.” Both sound weird.
Years later I found myself outside of a home for women who are mentally disabled painting tree trunks white. We all laughed because that morning some girls had gotten gussied up (and when I say gussied up, I mean had bathed) thinking we’d do some kind of relational ministry. Brandy had even asked our ministry contact if we’d need our bibles. He kind of laughed and said “you can bring your bible if you want.” But he never told us what we’d be doing. An hour long drive later we were handed brushes, paint and were directed to the trees.
To make matters even…stranger…after lunch they pointed to the trees behind the facility and told us to pick pine cones. We spent the afternoon picking pine cones. We still don’t know why we did that.
It was super splotchy that I think we got to a point where we just didn’t care if we did it right. We didn’t understand why they wanted it that color and how what we were doing made sense. We finished when the paint was gone and tried to clean up as best we could.
We changed our clothes and headed to the café near the church for a little Internet time. We were gone for maybe an hour and when we came back, Ashlee was at the bottom of the stairs asking if we’d seen the walls. We turned the corner and this bright non-splotchy yellow stared back at us. It actually looked good.
And our contact, who knows how Bulgarian paint works, probably knew that.
He knew that our haphazard painting would turn out well. I’m sure he also knew why our painting trees and picking pine cones was important. But we never knew and probably never will.
It’s a lesson that we’ll have to learn on the race. We’ll have to accept that a lot of our work is just “planting and plowing.”
Yeah, it’s hard to do the work and not see the point in it, but part of this trusting God thing is to also trust that he knows why some days are spent picking pine cones and painting trees and some are spent doing other things and KNOWING that he can and will turn even mundane tasks from splotchy to perfection.
