Posted on by Lori Cartmell

A Special Kind of Faith

Tulip bulbs at a flower market
Photo from Pxhere, Public Domain

They say that planting seeds is an act of faith.

I think that’s true: you put seeds in the ground in spring, hoping most will germinate and grow into a plant. If you’re lucky, you might see hints of growth in a few days, but often it can be weeks before a little green head pokes its way out of the soil.

If planting seeds takes faith, then I think it takes a special act of faith to plant bulbs in the fall.

In the fall, you know the days are getting shorter and colder. The leaves are dropping from the trees, and tender plants are beginning to die from early frosts. You know that snow will soon blanket the garden to the depth of a couple feet.

You’re heading into a barren season.

The precious tulip, daffodil, or hyacinth bulbs that you’ve just planted will disappear from your view for many months. You’ll have no indication that they’re all right, let alone any guarantee that they’ll eventually bloom. They may fall prey to rabbits, squirrels or deer. Who knows what will happen to them?

And yet you still go ahead and plant fall bulbs, trusting that they’ll survive the frigid winter and bloom later in spring.

Some things in our lives take special faith to trust for, too, don’t they?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Jam the Signal!

The tiger moth Bertholdia trigona is the only animal in nature known to jam
the echolocation of its predator
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Bats are crafty creatures.

Being nocturnal, bats search for food at night, but their night vision is fairly poor. So instead they use echolocation, or reflected sound, to home in on insects such as moths. Their built-in sonar directs them to the precise location of the tasty morsels; then it’s just a matter of swooping in and gobbling them up.

So the bats’ prey have to be crafty as well.

Certain species of tiger moth have the ability to emit sonar of their own. As a bat is closing in, the moth emits a fusillade of ultrasonic clicks. This barrage blurs and disrupts the bat’s echolocation: the signal is essentially jammed. The baffled hunter can no longer “see” the moth, and is tricked into thinking its target has vanished. Thwarted, the hungry predator flies away, and the prey is safe.

Our little tiger moth beats its enemy at its own game.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could “jam the signal” of the enemy of our soul? If we could disrupt and counter the lies the world tells us about ourselves?

In fact, there’s a way that we can.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Fill Up Your Storehouse

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

This is a busy (and nutty) time of year for squirrels.

The little critters are hard at work storing up nuts and seeds for the hard winter ahead.

Depending on the species, they may either store their nuts in one spot (a stash), or hide them by burying them in multiple locations (known as “scatter-hoarding”). They’ve even been known to shamelessly steal nuts from the stashes of other squirrels.

The jury is out on whether squirrels actually remember where they’ve hidden all those nuts. Some studies suggest they can recall the location of thousands of buried nuts. Other research implies that squirrels fail to recover a good number of their treasures, which allows the nuts and acorns to grow into trees.

One thing is for certain: these little guys are single-minded about gathering up nuts before winter, often using unconventional places to store them.

Like cars.

Just ask Bill Fischer of Fargo, North Dakota. For the past eight years, a red squirrel has been using Bill’s pickup truck to store walnuts. Each year, the poor man has to remove thousands of walnuts from every crevice of his truck, including the engine compartment and bumpers.

The critter set a new record several years ago, stashing 348 pounds of nuts in Bill’s vehicle. And this was all the work of one tiny squirrel.

These crafty little animals might exasperate us, but we can learn something from them:

They make sure they’ve “squirrelled away” provision for hard times to come.

I think we should do something similar:

Store up the Word of God in your heart, because you never know when you might need a certain verse to sustain you in a tough situation.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell · 2 Comments

You Dirty Dog!

Bad dog! Image from Picryl, Public Domain.

Imagine your living room is perfectly clean.

I mean perfectly. Your white couch is utterly spotless. Your white carpet looks pristine. There isn’t an iota of dust or dirt anywhere in the room.

And then your dog wants in.

Rover somehow found the only mud puddle in the dog park and spent a considerable amount of time rolling around in it.

He stands on the other side of the back door, wagging his tail and smiling, unable to figure out why you won’t let him in. After all, surely you love him, don’t you?

But you know that the second you let Rover in, he’ll shake his fur and send thousands of bits of mud all over your perfectly clean living room.

The solution?

Clean Rover off before he can enter the house. Hose him down, dry him off, and wipe his paws. Rover may not understand the necessity of all this, but it’s your living room and your rules.

Likewise, we sometimes can’t understand why God wouldn’t let us into Heaven just as we are.

Sure, we’ve committed a few sins, but we’re pretty decent people overall, aren’t we? Doesn’t God love us? What’s the necessity of a having a Saviour to atone for our sins?

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Still Water Reflects Best

Lago di Limides, Italy
Photo by Julius Silver on Pixabay

We seem to have difficulty being still these days, don’t we?

For many of us, life happens at warp speed. We’re always on the go, and have little downtime to pause and reflect on things.

But with all our constant motion, are we missing out on something?

Recently, I visited a park with a pond large enough to almost be a small lake. A slight breeze left ripples on the water, disturbing the reflection of the trees in the distance. The image on the water’s surface was wavy and impressionistic, not a true representation of the landscape nearby.

I then walked to a different part of the park where a river flowed lazily into the pond. The water was running slowly, and because it was sheltered from the breeze in this area, it was very still. The trees here were perfectly reflected in the water, giving a mirror image of their true forms.

I guess that to get the best reflection in water, stillness is the key.

Perhaps the spiritual lesson here is that if our lives are too frantic, it’s hard for us to reflect Christ.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Key to Stronger Faith

Chickadee Photo by Larry Doucet on Pixabay

A chickadee may have a bird-brain, but it can actually be pretty smart.

Especially if it lives in a harsh climate.

What does climate have to do with bird intelligence? As it turns out, more than you’d expect.

Biologists have discovered that chickadees living in the mountains or in northern latitudes, where the weather is more severe, were smarter than their peers living more comfortably down below.

Chickadees from harsher habitats had superior spatial memories and problem-solving abilities than those living in gentler climes. They were better at finding stored caches of food and at figuring out how to access a worm treat that scientists had cleverly tucked into a glass tube.

The harsh environment made their brains work a bit harder.

Is there a lesson for humans in the example of the chickadees?

Yes, but it isn’t to move to a more wintry climate (take it from a Canadian who’s done her share of shovelling snow—it hasn’t made me smarter!).

The takeaway here is that there can be unseen benefits to the challenges we face.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Promise of Return

Photo of Monarch butterfly by Peter Miller on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND-2.0

One of the greatest natural events on Earth is now underway: the migration of the monarch butterfly.

Each fall, millions of these colourful insects set off from their summer breeding grounds in the northeastern U.S. and Canada for a gruelling journey. They travel thousands of miles across North America all the way to Mexico, where they’ll spend the winter.

Many people believe that the monarch butterflies that leave in the fall are the same ones that arrive back in the spring, but this isn’t so. Individual butterflies don’t make the entire round-trip journey. The ones that migrate from the northeastern part of North America in fall will never return.

Rather, their great-great-grandchildren are the ones who will arrive the following spring, as successive generations keep making their way north. The entire annual migration cycle of the monarch takes about four generations.

Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but I can imagine monarch butterflies telling their children of the awesome journey they’ll be undertaking. They may say that they’ll only be able to go part of the way with them, but to keep the faith and keep going.

Maybe they encourage their children to tell successive generations to keep believing in the promise of return. Because eventually, their descendants will see the promise fulfilled.

Aren’t we in a similar situation as believers?

We’re living in a time when we’re awaiting the fulfillment of a promise, the promise of Christ’s return. We’re not sure exactly when Christ will come back to Earth, but He has promised that He will.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

What Geese Can Teach Us

Photo by David Mark on Pixabay

Usually, the first signs of fall are visual: the leaves on trees start to redden, the fall asters begin blooming, and the sun is at a noticeably lower angle.

But sometimes you can hear the onset of fall.

There’s a chill in the air hereabouts this week, and it won’t be long before we hear the sound of Canada geese honking at each other as they fly overhead, preparing to go south for the winter. They’ll fly to warmer climes in their iconic V-formation, honking the whole trip.

But why do they honk at one another as they undertake their momentous journey, and why fly in a V-shape at all?

The lessons geese can teach us have long been used in leadership seminars, but I think they apply to our Christian walk as well.

The V-shape that Canada geese fly in actually has aerodynamic benefits to the flock. As each goose flaps its wings, uplift is created for the bird following it. By flying in a V-formation, the flock can add over 70% more flying range than if each bird was flying on its own.

As Christians, we’re all “flying” in the same direction, pointing others to Christ. We have a common purpose, to bring others into the Kingdom, and a common destination, our heavenly home. We’re more effective when we work together in Christian community, because we give one another “uplift” and turbocharge one another’s efforts.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The God of Second Chances

Image by Irina from Pixabay

It’s an awesome feeling to realize that you’ve got a second chance, isn’t it?

A friend of mine discovered this after moving into a house with a large garden in the summer. A beginner gardener, she was delighted to finally have enough space for an extensive vegetable garden. She immediately planted some tomato and cucumber seedlings, which are now growing vigorously.

Because she’d moved in mid-summer, however, she lamented that she’d missed the chance to start growing vegetables like beets, spinach, peas, and carrots from seed in spring. She knew that cool-weather-loving veggies like peas wouldn’t thrive in the summer heat. She figured that if you didn’t plant those seeds in the spring, you’d missed your chance for the whole year.

But the garden, like God, often gives us second chances.

I told my friend that she could actually plant those seeds in summer for a fall harvest. There was still time to grow a second crop before the frosts of November hit. She hadn’t missed out after all: she could still grow the cool-weather veggies she’d hoped for.

What a wonderful metaphor for how God deals with us!

So often, we think we’ve missed out on what we’d wanted to accomplish or what God had planned for us. We figure that either the passage of time or our own mistakes have disqualified us from achieving our dreams. We lament that it’s too late for us.

But with God, it’s never too late. Our Heavenly Father never gives up on us, and never writes us off.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Language of Flowers and the Language of God

Say it with flowers!
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA-2.0

Flowers speak. Not just through their fragrance or their beauty, but with secret codes, too.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “language of flowers” that was popular during Victorian times?

This enchanting symbolic language enabled suitors to send coded messages to their paramours, ones that couldn’t be spoken aloud. The message depended on the particular flowers and colours chosen for the bouquet. An entire conversation could be carried out solely through flowers, with no words employed at all.

We all know that red roses symbolize true love, and we’d rightly guess that the forget-me-not begs that the giver be remembered. But did you know the following flower meanings?

Red carnation: My heart aches for you
Hyacinth: Your loveliness charms me
Canterbury bell: Your letter received
Yellow rose: Jealousy
Butterfly weed: Let me go
Weeping willow: Sadness

The Victorian language of flowers is a cryptic tongue. Most people only see the surface of the flower and not the symbolic meaning hidden within it.

God has His own “language of flowers,” but it actually encompasses all of creation. God is continually speaking to us through nature:

“For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” (Romans 1:20)
“The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.” (Psalm 19:1)

If we listened in to what nature was saying about its Creator, what messages would be revealed?

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