Morning Devotional

March 19, 2004

"Telephone Poles" 

by Don Emmitte

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Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6 NLT).

I was just thinking this morning (and I know that could be dangerous); the fictional story of a telephone pole captured my attention. It was once a Douglas fir towering nearly 80 feet above the forest floor. Its trunk swayed gently as the winds passed over the mountainside. Its great limbs, surrounded with successive layers of green foliage, were shading the plants beneath it. Yet one day the sound of a bulldozer disturbs its mountain home. The whine of chainsaws might have sent a chill through the trees as they began to fall one by one. Chainsaws lop off each limb that protrudes, and mighty jaws lift the giant tree on board a truck headed for the mill.

Inside the sounds of the mill are deafening. The debarker whines and bucks as it slices through branch stubs and reduces them to submissive knots. Layer after layer of bark and outer wood are peeled back until the trunk is naked and smooth. Its base is plunged into a vat of burning creosote and preservative forced into its pores with unremitting pressure. That process now complete, the new telephone pole is stacked with brother poles on yet another truck. And one day he feels himself drop to the side of the road. A crane stretches his top to the sky and lowers his feet into a deep hole. Climbing spikes and crossbeams, connectors and insulators, then strung with humming high voltage lines, now pierce the pole. Phone conversations and TV shows pass under his artificial limbs, but he does not hear them.

Perhaps he stands in stillness and ponders his fate. An occasional car rushes by or a hawk rests upon his top for a few moments waiting for rodents to stir in the field below. But mostly he stands stoic and sterile, never to grow again. All he can look forward to are the cracks and fissures that come with dryness and age. He will feel the rain and snow melt and trickle down those cracks into to the ground beneath that eventually will cause him to rot and decay. When he can, the pole lives in the fragrant memories of his past, not in the stark hopelessness of his present.

Does the story begin to sound familiar? Might it be a description of your life? My life hasn't exactly gone as I had planned either. But as I really think about that telephone pole I think it may have found a new meaning to his life that he had no reason to expect. Birds flutter near his top. Now, one of them inches down the pole and suddenly inflicts a new violence upon him. Bang, bang, bang. The woodpecker drives his sharp bill deeper and deeper into the pole's fibrous tissues. Bang, bang, bang. The hole is deep enough now. Peck, peck, and peck. The bird splinters the sides of the hole to widen it. It flies away momentarily, but now returns with something in its beak. It jams an acorn into the new hole until it is firmly wedged. And now the bird and his friends begin again. Bang, bang, bang. Peck, peck, and peck.

If you will look carefully, you can see that this particular telephone pole has been a favorite of generations of Acorn Woodpeckers. Every deep crack, every widening crevice is jammed with hundreds of acorns. Every hole whittled out in years gone by is stuffed with an acorn against the coming winter. Enough acorns are there to feed an entire colony of woodpeckers the whole winter long. They will not starve, for their food tree sustains them. And as I see the pole surrounded by its woodpeckers, bearing a harvest not its own for a family not its own, I sense it has grown more philosophical, more thankful with age. Few trees aspire to be telephone poles, you know, but for many that is their destiny. Often we can feel only pain and loss. We suffer. We hurt. We feel sorry for ourselves. But sometimes, if we can grasp it, God is creating for us a new and wonderful life through that which has died. Who would think that an aging pole could be thankful for a colony of woodpeckers? Who indeed?