It’s possible that most of you are completely unaware of a shortage going on around here, an unlikely shortage given the amount of trees that we have. Green firewood!

Firewood in summer? Yes, now’s the time to buy it. And, if you wanted green firewood last year, or the year before, or as far back as I can remember and you had no problems getting it in any quantity you’d like just about any time of the year, even in the dead of winter. That’s because loggers would stockpile it and let it dry out – but they had only so much room to do that. So if a customer wanted to snag a bunch of it, the loggers would gladly sell it to make room for more, usually at a reduced price over the seasoned wood. Since everyone burns the 2-4 year old stuff, the green on bountiful years simply got in the way. This is no longer true!

I don’t know where they are keeping it, but no one has any green wood for sale. I suppose it’s being stored up for future sales. In any case, I called literally a dozen different places and found not a one who’d sell me any, regardless of the price. Oh, plenty of them will sell me seasoned wood at almost $300 a cord (least year it went for about $200) and they will sell me short-seasoned wood. That means wood that’s only dried out for a year – in other words what they used to call green – for the same price as the full seasoned stuff. Yikes!

Now, I don’t kid myself that we are running out of trees and even the loggers won’t tell you that (yes, I asked). They’re cranking out the wood but they can’t keep up with demand – thus they’ve raised the prices to slow down cheap people like me from buying it all up. Oh, I could cut down some of my own, but I’ve got a forest of pine trees and I’d like to stick with pure hardwoods as long as I can get away with it. And, frankly, I’m a little lazy. Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink, as the saying goes. Surrounded by trees and I can’t manage to locate a stick of decent hardwood firewood.

That made me think of what the Lord said to his disciples. Often times we look about and think there’s no one interested in studying the bible. We suppose everyone is already caught up in worldly living and worldly thinking, so much that they’d never be interested in what the bible has to say. Yet Jesus pointed out that the field was white, that the harvest was plentiful but the reapers were few. Maybe what we need to look at is not “prospects” from the point of view of rejection. That is, stop “measuring” people on a scale from 1 to 10 on how likely they are to receive the word, and instead just note if they are lost and need to hear the message or not and God can take care of the rest.

Let’s face it – I don’t like pine because it burns faster than hardwoods and I have to carry more of it in the house, meaning more work for me. Waaaa! Am I going to just do nothing and freeze this winter because I have no wood at all? Of course not – if I can’t get the hardwoods then I’m gonna do what I have to do and drop/cut/split my own. So when we look around and we don’t see people lining up at our door, waiting to hear the good news, are we just going to do nothing because it means we have to work harder for God than we wanted to? Well, then at least we can console ourselves knowing that if we do nothing freezing will never be something we have to worry about <smile!>

Randy