Whenever I pass by the kitchen sink and glance out my kitchen window … out in the forest a little chipmunk is busy at work! Scampering here! Scampering there! Up the stump! Down the stump! Back up the stump! Back down the stump!
Yesterday I totally stopped everything and just stood at the kitchen sink for the longest time watching the little chipmunk!
The little chipmunk is working hard! Its cache of winter food must be somewhere over there in the forest in or around that stump.
Up the Bigleaf maple tree the little chipmunk scampered! High, high up in the branches I watched it climb! It was “sawing off” the little seed clusters and dropping them down to the ground.
I’m in awe of what a hard worker that little chipmunk is!
The sunflowers in the small berry garden had reached the end of their growing season. They were beginning to fall over and drag the ground. So I headed out to trim them off, and tidy up the berry garden.
The sunflower heads were full of seeds! Seeds which that little chipmunk will be needing for its winter food supply.
I was in awe of how God, our loving creator, has designed the heavy sunflowers to fall over and drag the ground … so that little creatures, like tiny little chipmunks, can be able to access the food.
(Thank you God for your loving care for your creation!)
I trimmed off the sunflower stalks and laid them in a nice tidy pile outside the berry garden. That way the little chipmunk could have easy access to all those wonderful seeds!
A few days later I went back out to the garden to gather tomatoes and beans. As a side thought I stopped by the sunflower-stalk pile to see how the little chipmunk was doing gathering the seeds out of the sunflower heads.
Much to my great surprise … the sunflower heads were totally and completely gone! All of them!
I turned back to the vegetable garden and suddenly realized that the 8-10-foot-tall sunflower stalks in the big garden were completely missing their sunflower heads as well!
Who knew! I had no idea tiny little chipmunks could climb 10-foot tall sunflower stalks and saw off the entire heads … and then carry them away! All of them!
And as an aside, how did that little chipmunk know that those sunflower heads way up there, 10-feet in the air, were ripe and ready for harvest??
I was impressed! For such a tiny little chipmunk … that was a ton of hard work!
Here you can see the two sunflower heads I saved for myself.
(The little chipmunk in the forest was such a hard worker I was a bit worried it might carry away these two sunflower heads I had set aside for myself.)
Changing thoughts … it takes a lot of work to harvest, dry, and crack-apart sunflower seeds!
First, I had to shell out all those seeds from the sunflower heads. It took time. It wasn’t exactly easy. And since the sunflower seeds are “blackish” my fingers wound up stained a beautiful dark purple color afterwards.
Here you can see my sunflower seeds drying out in metal pans in the window. It takes time for sunflower seeds to dry out.
Once the sunflower seeds are dried out, next comes the extra-time-consuming task of cracking-apart the outer shell to access the delicious part in the middle.
So where am I going with all of this?
It takes hard work for the little chipmunk to gather food! So also, in the same way, it takes hard work for us to gather “spiritual food.” We can’t just show up at church on Sunday and listen to a 30-45 minute sermon and expect that to be enough spiritual food to sustain us throughout the week.
We’re gonna have to put some hard work into it!
Just like I trimmed off the sunflower stalks and laid them in a nice tidy pile for the little chipmunk to access … that right there is what is happening when we go to church on Sunday. Our pastor has done some work to make God’s Word accessible and available for us!
But we’re gonna have to put some hard work into it too!
Just like the little chipmunk sawed off all the heads from that pile and carried them away to be stored in a cache … so also, we too need to take that spiritual food which our pastor has provided and carry it back home with us! We need to carry it throughout our week. We need to carry it to the workplace with us! We need to store that spiritual food in the cache of our heart & mind!
It takes work! It takes hard work on our part to gather spiritual food and store it away in our heart & mind.
But the little chipmunk didn’t just rely only on me to make the food easily accessible and available. The little chipmunk climbed up the 10-foot tall sunflower stalks! The little chipmunk sawed off those heavy sunflower heads! And the little chipmunk dragged them back!
We have to do the same thing!
We have to be willing to do the hard work to climb up “10-foot tall” passages of Scripture ourselves; “saw them off” (aka: bring it “down-to-earth” where we can make sense of it and understand it); then do the hard work to get that spiritual food stored in the cache of our heart & mind!
How about let’s apply this same concept to me shelling, and drying, and cracking-apart the sunflower seeds.
* It’s going to take hard work … and time … for us to “shell out” spiritual food from the Scriptures.
* It’s going to take hard work … and time … for those spiritual truths to “cure” in our minds. To really get in our heart & soul. We need to mentally process those spiritual truths. We need to meditate on those insights. We need to ponder them … and turn them over and over in our mind.
* And it’s going to take hard work … and time … to “crack-apart” the outer shell to access the delicious part in the middle.
If you’re going to grow in your spiritual life, you’re gonna have to put some work into it!
You can’t rely on the pastor to feed you everything you need.
You … you’re gonna have to work for it!
