My in-laws live on a mountain, and in their back yard they have a very tall tree, perhaps the tallest one in the neighborhood. Because it is so tall and hard to work on, it does not get worked on very often. But for some reason today I felt like I should do some trimming on my in-laws tree.

While I was pulling off the dead branch stumps off the tree along with pulling the deab branch hairs that get left behind, my sweet three year old son placed a shovel next to me, and then went on his marry way. He was quite adamant that I should have it. I thought to myself okay, and went back to what I was doing.

Through out my life I’ve never liked rules that did not make sense to me. Nor did I like people just telling me I had to do something just because. If you would say I questioned authority through out my life, and I would concure I have. This has been both a blessing an a cursing in my life. Especially at my job. A cursing because my bosses did not always apprieciate it, and a blessing at work because of my questioning I was able to prevent bad things from happening and also fix problems. You could say that I did not always know when it was appropriate to question. But I would ask when is it not okay to ask questions? I wish Hitler’s follower’s asked questions instead of blindly doing what they were told. There are so many more examples of this. But suffice it to say that evil does not want good man asking questions or standing up to them.

The reason I brought that up is because I try not to tell my children not to do something on some whim I had at the moment. But have specific reasons for the rules I teach them. And my son was not doing anything bad with giving me the shovel, so I let it be.

A little after he gave me the shovel, I started wishing there was better way to remove the remaining dead branch hairs than just pulling them off with my hands. Then it dawned on me, the shovel with it’s thin edges would be great at cutting the dead branches hairs off. I’d say it speed the trimming of the tree up by more than a hundred times. If my son had planted the seed of the idea in my head, I’d still be pulling off the dead branch hairs by hand because when I start something I want to finish it.

When I thought I was done, my spouse asked me if I could do a little more because one spot stook out like a sore thumb. I agreed it did, if you look at the picture I took before I thought I was done below, it was the hairy part just below the remaining dead branches. At my spouses request I undertook the task to remove the rats nest that originally did not look so bad to me, perhaps because I was getting weary from the work and wanted to be done. After thinking about it some, it was not going to be so daunting as I initially thought.

Part of trimming the dead branch stumps and dead branch hairs is gathering the dead branch parts together. I’ll be burning these dead branch parts at the next asado, basically an Argentina BBQ, I will do, which will be a great feast.

When I was done with trimming the portion of the tree I could do, for I could not do it all on my own, my in-laws and spouse told they were pleased with what I had done and that it looks much better now.

I believe that the Lord God teaches people with parables and metaphors all the time, even with the events in our lives. God has given me things right when I needed them on so many occations, too many of them to count to be honest. I pray that we all stay open and connected to God, that we will listen and obey Him and not the false traditions of men we all grow up with and are inundated with.

Personally I see much symbolism, depth and wisdom in this parable that God gave me. Please take a minute to look at what I said about PaRDeS in Bishops are JUDGEs of Israel as I believe it will add depth to your scripture study. (If the article is to long to read you can search for PaRDeS, in most programs the hotkey is Ctrl+F.)

I believe some of the symbolism in this parable is very apparent but some may not be. One thing I’ll bring up is how hair is symbolic of authority. (I learned that from one of videos from UNLEARN the lies, sorry I don’t remember which video and that I don’t have the time right now to find it again. I’ll try to find it another time.)