The Trees He Planted for Us

In 1987, Harold Matheson drove thirty bare-root walnut saplings into the red clay of his property outside Willamette, Oregon. His own children thought he'd lost his mind. Black walnuts take twenty to thirty years to produce a serious harvest. Harold was already fifty-two.

But Harold wasn't planting for himself. In a leather journal found after his death in 2009, his family discovered an entry dated the same week he dug those holes: "These are for the grandchildren I haven't met yet. They'll need shade and good wood and something to remind them they were thought of before they arrived."

His granddaughter Elise, born in 1994, never knew about that journal entry until she was twenty-eight. She walked the rows of those towering walnut trees — now producing abundantly — and wept. Every single tree had been planted with her in mind before she existed.

Paul tells the Ephesians something far more staggering. Before the foundation of the world — before a single star burned or ocean churned — God the Father chose you in Christ. Not as an afterthought. Not as a contingency plan. He predestined you for adoption, lavished His grace upon you, and secured an inheritance with your name written into it. The blessing was planted long before you drew your first breath. You were always part of His design, chosen according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glory.