The Lowly Pine Beetle

3/27/2024

            In the Spring of 2004, after longing to live in the mountains of Colorado for at least fifty years, I finally moved from Kansas to Northern Colorado.  Having spent all of my life in the Midwest states of Missouri and Kansas, it was quite an adventure!  For me, the drive west from Kansas City into Northern Colorado was like living in a dream, and putting Kansas in my rear-view mirror was exhilarating, because every mile farther west felt like we were escaping New York.

            In my opinion, Colorado is the most diverse and interesting state in America, and there is still almost a frontier aura to the land, even though the first 100 miles west from the Kansas line on Highway I-70 is just like Kansas.  The first view of any mountains occurs from Limon, Colorado, and then they almost appear imaginary on the western horizon; they look like clouds, but they don’t move.  From the truck stop on Limon’s one hill, the sense of adventure is steadily pervasive, and it is easy to imagine the trip in a covered wagon in the 1800’s. 

            After spending a week in a Loveland trailer park, we made the decision to relocate in the Estes Park area, about thirty-five miles due west of Loveland on Highway 34.  Winding up through the Big Thompson Canyon, knowing we were finally going to be home in the mountains, a dream both my wife and I had harbored for decades, was absolutely incredible, but the experience went off the charts when we rounded the last turn into Estes Park, through what I call the Gateway Rocks.  Immediately upon completion of the right-hand turn, the mountains literally exploded in our faces, and were so incredibly beautiful it took our breaths away!  The town lay in front of us at the bottom of a gentle sloping road and appeared like a small jewel in the lap of luxury.  We knew we were home!  You probably guessed my heart is still there, and always will be.

            There are many folks who live in Colorado who can sit on their land and look over at the mountains, but take it from me, living in the mountains is quite different.  The mountain air is light and clean, compared to anywhere in the Midwest, and every day is a separate adventure with numerous and distinctive weather systems, animals and terrain.  Every corner on every road opens upon a potentially life-changing experience, but I fear I’m trying in vain to describe the indescribable. 

            Up close, the mountains are like a very beautiful woman; they are clothed in God’s beautiful creativity, but they can also be very dangerous.  On foot, the mountain trails seem benign and innocent, but they kill unwary folks every year, because their harsh hardness can destroy just as quickly as it can enthrall.  A great many plains-dwelling tourists go for family-friendly hikes with their kids off-leash, so to speak, and some find out their flip-flops and tee shirts can, without warning, be hyperthermic for them.  And a few of them have their very last view of their child as he bounds out of sight ahead of them on the trail, a trail that unbeknownst to them is within the territory of a mountain lion, struggling to feed his family fresh meat.  Being stupid in the mountains can be terminal, but thankfully not that often. 

            All of the foliage where we lived was dominated by big Ponderosa pine trees, some of which were over 500 years old, and the mountains were covered with Ponderosa pines and Aspen trees filling in the old burn areas.  The wind blowing through the trees is usually constant, and the leaves of the aspens, golden yellow in the short Fall season, are constantly in motion.  Being among the aspens in the Fall is like bathing in a gold cascade.  I still cannot accurately describe the experience!  We took scores of professional-quality photos with ease, as they framed themselves in every direction, but little did we know then that God privileged us to see Colorado in its glory, right before it all changed…enter the lowly pine beetle.

            Several years after our arrival, an invasion of pine beetles also arrived.  They are very tiny, insignificant black beetles that bore into the trunks of Ponderosa pines, leaving small, neat holes to announce their presence.  Within only several hours of boring into the tree, the tree is irretrievably dead, although it may not know it for months.  However, several months later the stately giant is brown and brittle.  Due to the infestation, our mountains turned from green and clean to brown and dead.  It was, and probably still is, devastating.  Our only good news was that we had hundreds of pre-beetle photos to testify to the original glory of the mountains, something today’s tourists may never see in their lifetimes. 

            As I reflected this morning on the pine beetle invasion, I was struck with how similar our Christian experiences can be, and the Old Testament nation of Israel, called out by God, was also similar.  At first, the exhilaration of being loved by God, and knowing it, is very exciting, but very shortly after the honeymoon fades, life has a way of boring into our trunks, and sapping the new life away…and we seldom realize it’s happening.  We don’t run away from our first Love; we drift.  And as we drift, we compromise, and as we compromise, we fall. 

Entire lives can easily be spent in our club-card churches, but while we are told weekly that we are all right, many might secretly wonder if they aren’t actually starving.  The thrust of Jesus’ teachings was not to sit in our churches and hear sermons about how we should love ourselves; His teachings were a radical departure from that view, and His subsequent death and resurrection paved the way for the invasion of His Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit was specifically sent to empower and enable Christ’s followers to live drift-free Christian lives on earth via the baptism in Him, which is on view throughout the Book of Acts.  The experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit is still available to those that want it, but many have been turned away by religious doctrines designed to enforce lifeless, religious lives. 

The only sure way to keep religious pine beetles from boring into us and killing us, and the only antidote, is the Holy Spirit.  Without Him, we are ripe for death.  Jesus said as much in Matthew 24:28, “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” 

Vultures only feed on the dead.

John