Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Sabbath, April 26, 2025
When I was growing up on the prairies of South Dakota, I would read stories which happened in distant lands. Once in a while the stories would mention the ginkgo tree, and since we didn’t have them in the Dakotas (at least nobody pointed them out to me), I regarded them with awe, assuming I would never see one unless I became a foreign missionary.
When we moved to our current home a couple of decades ago, I was pleasantly surprised to discover two such trees in the neighborhood where we live. One of them has disappeared — probably landscaped out of existence in favor of a new concept. The other still stands, and it’s been fun to watch its leaves renew and grow each spring.
If, like me, you’ve not been exposed to ginkgos, you can see that one remaining one in the above photo I took Friday of this week. What has intrigued me about the leaves is that they don’t look like other trees’ leaves. Instead, they unfurl into a trumpet shape.
It makes me wonder about the leaves — and the fruit — of another exotic tree, the Tree of Life. It’s mentioned first in Genesis 2:9, but once Adam and Eve ate the fruit of another and forbidden tree, they were sent away from Eden.
The Tree of Life shows up again, however, in Revelation 22:1, 2 [NKJV]. The setting is the New Earth:
And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
How those leaves actually do “heal the nations” we’re not sure. But they must be fascinatingly therapeutic. This makes me want to eat that tree’s fruit, and pluck those leaves.
Check out some more heart-tingling Bible passages about Heaven in the link just below.