By Jim Nichols

We may try to fool ourselves otherwise, but we must truthfully recognize that we do not like change. It seems that about the time we figure out how to use some features on our cell phones or our computers, necessity requires us to “update.” Of course, these newer options are not recognizable to us so we must learn new tricks. Or, for example, if you buy a newer model car, be prepared for an array of electronic dashboard options labeled with cryptic icons and, though advertised as “important advances,” may remain mysterious past when you buy yet another car. 

Although those changes are irritating, there are certainly changes on the grander life scale that can be not only frustrating, but discouraging, depressing, and even faith challenging. “Why did I suffer this family loss?” “How did I lose this job at which I excelled?” “I felt sure that I understood God’s plan for my life and look at me now.”

At the risk of talking a little biology, there are some conversions or changes of processes in the biological world that may give us reassurance. Perhaps we become too tied to one status and need to be more open to the transition to another status; it occurs in other forms of life all the time. Our biological illustration could include an individual that many identify as one of the greatest violinists in history, Jascha Heifetz. It leads us to consideration of leaves on trees.

Heifetz (1901-1987) was born in Russia and spent his early years there before his family escaped violence of the Russian Revolution and moved to the United States. He was already an accomplished violinist and made his Carnegie Hall debut at sixteen. With a wide-ranging musical career, audiences applauded him worldwide. He owned four Stradivarius violins, one of the most famous musical instruments in the world. 

With masterful skill, he used his instrument constructed of wood to add beauty to human lives. That wood came from a tree.

The leaves of a tree are a synthesizing factory. Chloroplasts not only make the leaf green but serve as sites for photosynthesis. This nearly magical process uses sunlight energy to capture carbon dioxide from the air and chemically convert it into sugars that nourish the tree. Included in the tree life is the development of transportation channels like tubes; these distribute the manufactured sugars generally downward in the tree and water from the ground generally upward. We note that the tree is effectively reaching upward for light and downward for water and nutrients, yet the tree is not torn apart by these opposites.

As a tree ages, newer transportation channels successively replace the older ones, and the old ones harden into the rings of the tree. This is part of a maturation process resulting in what we identify as wood.

Humans have devised multiple uses for wood, of course, but the focus here is on wood for a violin. If the tree is felled on purpose or incidentally by the environment, the tree may cease to exist as such, but the wood continues. Someone somewhere took the wood from a felled tree and converted it into Stradivarius violins. Musical geniuses such as Heifetz used the violins to enrich the world with music.

While we are wondering and following these transitions, note that someone could have converted the tree to wood pulp rather than into a violin. Although you are probably reading this on a computer screen, you could well be reading it on a sheet of paper—paper made from processed wood pulp. What is paper except processed trees? Do humans know how to print ink letters on the processed trees? Absolutely. Is much of human knowledge transmitted by individuals reading the information and inspiration on these flattened, printed, processed trees? Absolutely.

As we move through life with unpredictable yet significant changes for us, we are really following the pattern that God has established. It would appear that God’s vision of usefulness changes and is different from our human visions. There must be transitions of glory in God’s eyes from carbon dioxide molecules to tree rings to violins to concertos to paper with written messages about God.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain