You can tell from the title of our website trees hold a special place in my life. I love them. And no tree stands out in my mind more than my grandmother’s magnolia. It was enormous, at least to the 8-year-old girl who would visit her small house on the corner of Church Street in Columbia. It was the kind of tree that could hold the secrets as well as the weight of several healthy children scrambling up in a race to the top. My grandmother’s house was a favorite place not only for the lure of the tree but because her presence filled the place with love and simple pleasures. I eagerly awaited each trip to the house and the tree.
Magnolia blooming in my yard
Partly due to the long ago memories of one magnolia, I was thrilled when we planted one in our yard some eight years back. I’ve watched for the first sign of blooms every year only to be disappointed. Several years ago I was driven to research this failure, and I learned that Magnolia grandiflora may take up to fifteen years before flowering. I finally came to accept its diva status and figured it would probably bloom when the idea was totally its own. This year seems to be the year. Walking through the yard today checking long-neglected plants, I noticed buds on my magnolia tree. Finally. I quickly snapped a photo and sent it to Phil for independent confirmation. Is this a bud? Yes! He replied. A while later Phil called to check on Maggie, and he reminded me of the tree’s origin I had somehow forgotten.
Phil’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. It had spread to his lymph nodes before detection. The cancer was adenocarcinoma, the same as Maggie’s. After a brief delay due to the arrival and aftermath of Katrina in late the summer of 2005, he underwent surgery and chemotherapy in Hattiesburg. He bravely fought for nearly a year. In June 2006 he died with his family around him. Our close friends, Mike and Debbie, gave us a magnolia tree to plant in our yard in his memory. The same magnolia that is now beginning to bloom.
Jeremiah 17:7,8 Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. For 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; But its leaves will be green, and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit. In my search to better understand my tree and its finicky ways, I did some reading. The magnolia is resistant to fire due to its bark and resistant to hurricane-force winds due to a deep-reaching taproot. The tree and flower are symbolic of grace, hospitality and perseverance.
Perseverance. My father-in-law knew about that. He had experienced the highs of professional success and the depths of personal betrayal. But he understood grace and its need to reconcile. So, he approached his betrayer with forgiveness and gained a brother in Christ and a fruitful prison ministry where hundreds came to know that saving grace. My grandmother knew perseverance, too. She faced the challenge of being sole breadwinner for her family due to her husband’s chronic illness and early death. She worked as a seamstress in a parachute factory and was an active force in her small church. She battled breast cancer in the early seventies before early detection would have given her a fighting chance.
Maggie is facing her own challenge where perseverance may be the lone resource to pull her from one day into the next. I wish she could learn trust in a different way, a non-painful, more convenient, less life-altering way. But being blessed does not entail being free of fire and drought, as we read in Jeremiah. It does involve a whole-hearted, single-purposed trust in the Lord. And it’s that trust that produces perseverance. If she has to experience it this way, I’m thankful she can do so with a legacy of faithfulness to emulate. The trust my grandmother quietly lived. The trust my father-in-law professed in his final hours using the words of a faithful servant found in Job 19:25 As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. A trust that blooms afresh in each generation.
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