Picture a forest on fire.

Now picture this: somewhere inside that fire, a single pine cone has about twenty-five seconds to live its whole purpose.

Not twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five seconds. Long enough for the resin sealing it shut to melt. Short enough that the seeds inside don't burn. Too fast, and the cone never opens. Too slow, and there's nothing left to open it for. Twenty-five seconds, and a cone that's been closed for years finally lets go, dropping thousands of seeds onto ground that fire just cleared for them.

That's not a metaphor I made up. It's a real thing that happens in Yellowstone, to trees called serotinous pines, every time the park burns. And the burned ground doesn't just recover, it becomes harder to burn again for the next fifty years.

Fire didn't just fail to end something. It started something.

The math of a second chance

Here's what gets me about that twenty-five-second window: it's not generous. It's exact. God didn't build in room for error. And yet — inside that narrow, unforgiving margin, life doesn't just survive. It multiplies. One tree, burning, becomes a forest that isn't there yet.

We tend to file fire under "destruction" and move on. But watch it closely enough, in the right kind of forest, and it looks less like an ending and more like a hand finally opening.

The furnace we didn't ask for

Most of us know what it's like to be inside our own version of that fire. The diagnosis, the loss, the collapse of a plan we'd built a life around. It doesn't feel like twenty-five seconds. It feels endless while you're in it.

But some of the most alive people you'll ever meet are the ones who've been through something that should have ended them. Not because the trial was good. It wasn't. But because it burned off whatever was keeping them closed, and something in them finally opened. They loved harder. They noticed more. They stopped waiting for the "right time" to matter to someone.

Our lives really are brief, the way that window is brief. Which might be less of a threat and more of an invitation: you don't have to wait to give what you have.

Even while it's burning, it's still giving

Here's the part of the pine cone that stays with me longest: the tree doesn't get to see the forest it makes possible. It's gone before the seeds ever take root. It gives everything it has and never gets to watch what grows from it.

That's not really a tree thing. That's a love thing. The kind of love that keeps opening its hands even when opening them costs something? That's the same shape of love Christianity has always pointed to at the center of everything: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Not love that waits until it's convenient. Love that gives while it's costly, so that something else can live.

Look again

Maybe that's the invitation hiding inside a burning forest: the next time something in your life feels like it's being consumed, it's worth asking what might be opening because of it...in you, or through you, for someone else.

That's not just what fire does in a forest. It's who Christ has always been...love that gives while it's costly, so something else can live.

Nature keeps testifying to His character, over and over, if we're willing to look closely enough to see it.

Until next time,

Michelle

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