The Ignorant Birth: Explaining Magnolias

My great-grandmother died recently. She had been living in a nursing home for just over a year, and had grown accustomed to living there. She had been in her house for longer than I have been alive, almost always living alone, even into her late eighties. In her old backyard, there is a magnolia tree. In July, I took a seed pod from the ground near the trunk. All of the seeds were missing from it, picked out by birds and squirrels, just as they had always been when I was a kid. I didn't realize at the time that the pod was seedless, and took it home anyway, not knowing that it could ever grow, no matter how much water, soil, and sunlight it was exposed to. Digging away the soil of our garden with a scrap of wood, I planted the seedless pod tonight. I know now that I had planted something dead, never useful for becoming a tree.

Rewind to Wednesday morning: I was walking to my car at school to grab some textbooks in order to work through lunch. I noticed two or three magnolia trees with seed pods ready to fall...

Back to the present: I have convinced myself that I should collect a seed-pod from school on Monday afternoon. Even though my own seed pod is dead, this second pod is filled with seeds, ready to burst forth in new life. Now what if I planted the new seed pod directly on top of the old, dead one? Could I not, in complete ignorance, assume that it was the old seed pod, and not the new one, that burst forth in life? I know this is an illogical and ignorant assumption, but will anyone on Earth correct me if I say that any resulting seedling is a product of the dead husk, and not the living pod?

I promised myself that I wouldn't start in on faith in my first post, lest I attract the harassment of people with nothing better to do, but I will anyway. The metaphor of these magnolia pods directly relates to my relationship with Christ! I was dead, completely devoid of the possibility that I might grow into a tree someday. But another, perfectly healthy seed pod was planted in my place, so that I would be considered to have life, and that I would grow skyward by the strength of someone else.

It's been a rough week, but the death of my one and only Nanny may have been just the thing to spur me on in my hopeless and never ending pursuit of holiness, trying to reach for a height beyond my means.