The Pastor’s Piece – Pastor Kevin Cernek, FCFI Chaplain

FCFI

November 2, 2025

Over the course of our lives my wife and I have owned a few homes and moved a few times. The longest we’ve stayed at one place is 19 years. One thing we’ve always done is improve the places we’ve lived both inside and outside. We like to move walls and reconfigure the inside to fit our preferences. And, we like to move dirt, landscape, and plant trees and bushes outside.

When we lived in warm climates, we planted eucalyptus and palm trees. Our favorites are palm trees. They grow fast and represent their tree family well. They grow fast because they live in an environment that is conducive to a 12 month growing season. They get no time off.

Here in the Midwest we like to plant evergreen trees. There are two reasons for this: 1) They are green year round. And 2) They don’t mess up your yard and plug up your rain gutters in the fall. At one of our former places of residence, our lot opened in the back to a small field and beyond that was an industrial complex. Not wanting to look at the back side of a factory when we sat out on the patio, we decided to plant 32 evergreens along our property line. They were a mixture of white pine, Norway spruce, blue spruce, and douglas fir. They were only about two feet tall when we planted them, but it still involved a lot of digging. They grew to about six feet tall before we sold the place and moved to the country. We drive by our old house in town every once in a while and those trees are now more than 30 feet tall and fully filled out. They look great and make a wonderful border fence.

At our first place in the country, the trees were very old and falling down. Every time the wind blew just a little, the yard would become littered with dead branches. I was constantly cleaning up. At one point, a tornado went through and toppled eight of them at once. They fell on the house, shed, hog house, and across the driveway. The place was a mess, to say the least. The neighbors came over that day and by nightfall we had all the trees cleaned up and the broken roofs tarped. Most of the downed trees were hard maple so we stacked them in one place and later, we had a bunch of people from church over and had a wood-cutting party. We had enough firewood for that winter and beyond. Before that storm hit, we had a total of 51 trees in our yard. After the clean-up we decided to replace some of the others before they too went down. There were 14 trees in a straight row on the west side of the house near the road that had survived the storm, but they had long since used up their usefulness. So, one day we cut them all down and hauled the brush to the burn pile and eventually cut the rest up for firewood. Then we had the stump buster out and ground up the stumps. I spent a day cleaning up after him, hauling away bark mixed with dirt and replacing it with fresh dirt from the pasture.

Shortly after that, we made a trip to the nursery to buy some new trees to replace all of those. They love us there and for good reason – we ended up going back three times. Over the course of about fifteen years, we’ve purchased over 40 trees from that nursery. Choosing trees, figuring out how to configure them on your property, and planting them is actually a very enjoyable exercise. For the record, we’re not tree-huggers, just people who like trees. My wife talked to someone at a Christmas tree farm and he said, “Look, we grow trees. They are our cash-crop. We grow them; harvest them; and every year we plant a new crop.” That makes sense. We like “live” Christmas trees, even though, technically, if they’re cut, they’re dead.

Fast forward to last week. We had been landscaping around the barn that we moved to our property a few years ago. My wife spent some time on the phone checking on trees and availability. It is getting late in the year and if one is going to plant yet this fall, it needs to be done now. She discovered that our favorite nursery (the one we’ve purchased 40 trees from) was having a season end sale. Everything was 50 to 75% off. We made the first trip with just the truck and came home with three trees. Then we went back with the trailer and picked up another ten trees. That’s all I could haul at one time. The root balls on those things are heavy. My poor half ton truck was practically dragging the ground. On the way home, we had to stop three times – twice to adjust the safety chains attached to the hitch to keep them from dragging on the pavement, and once for coffee and apple cider donuts at an orchard along the way. The next day I made a final trip with my three-quarter ton truck this time and brought home an additional six trees. For those keeping track at home – that’s a total of 19 new trees. That’s a lot of trees, especially when our original intent was to just purchase seven. The average height is about eight feet tall. The neighbor came over with his mini excavator and made a bunch of holes in the ground and between him and my wife and me, we had them all planted in three and half hours. Now my job is to keep them watered. Fortunately I have a 500 gallon tote and can keep them hydrated with all the water they need until the weather gets cold. Then we’ll pick it up again next spring.

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease,” (Genesis 8:22).   

(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin).