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Arctic Forests

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Objectively speaking, you might say, the Arctic and the equator receive the "same amount" of sunshine. The critical difference, of course, is when and how. Not even the nonstop sunshine of an Arctic summer can make up for the night. The "same amount" of sunlight is not equally distributed ...

What if the first eighteen years of your life were an Arctic winter? What if all the sunlight in your life comes late, at an oblique angle? What if the sun cyclically disappears from a life for nights that seem like they’ll never end? To grow just one membraned layer under such conditions is a feat. To add another ring - to endure - is an achievement. Some years are longer than others.

Don’t compare your sturdy temperate trees to your neighbour’s Arctic forest. You can’t imagine how much implacable energy it took to grow those saplings. You might not be able to fathom what they have endured. You don’t know how ancient that forest is, how much time it has spent enveloped in darkness.

Even more importantly: don’t compare the trees of your tundra existence to someone else’s equatorial rain forest. God doesn’t. They live in different conditions. The sun shines upon the just and the unjust, but not at the same angle or with the same intensity. The birch saplings that have punched up through the crust of your prior life are miracles of grace. (Remember when you thought nothing could ever grow there?) They’ve never lived through your winter. They don’t know how long your night has been. By the grace of God, you’ve endured the dark.

- James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time, 53-54

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