Room for a Ceiba
Several towering Ceiba trees stood on our property in the eastern lowlands of Costa Rica. Using their shadows I could calculate they stood close to 70 metres (230 feet) tall. With their buttressed trunks and huge canopies they towered above and beyond all the surrounding rainforest.
I loved our impressive Ceibas, all the more so once I knew how they reproduce.
Unlike chestnut, walnut, oak or other common trees who simply drop their seeds and “bloom where planted,” Ceiba trees do nothing of the kind.
Each Ceiba seed pod contains hundreds upon hundreds of tiny seeds. Every seed, almost too small to see, comes with a parachute. On windy days Ceiba seeds fly far and wide above the surround forest, far out across the lowlands, the surrounding cities and ports all over Central America.
What kind of tree are you?
A chestnut? A walnut? An oak, that will only sprout where all of your kind have always stood—close together, under your parents’ sheltering branches, growing slowly for 75 or a hundred years—until the previous giants around you finally die and allow you to see the wind, storms and sunlight for yourself?
Perhaps.
But if you are not a chestnut, not a walnut or not an acorn but a Ceiba seed, look up! Prepare! Let loose, and fly—wherever the Wind of the Spirit of the LORD will blow you. Then, if you land and sprout in the LORD’s good timing and place, be assured, another glorious Ceiba will stand for his glory where he wishes for you to be!
Everything depends on your kind.