Cork

This piece is about the tree, not the city, (though that might be worth visiting again sometime). Its about an unprepossessing lump of bark.

Now, I would not be a cork farmer for anything. It would seem to me to require the patience of Job. When you plant a cork tree for the first time, apparently, you have to wait 40 years, yes that’s 40 years, for your first harvest. And then you can only harvest the cork bark after that every 9 years.
In Portugal from Lisbon south to the Algarve the countryside is dotted with these gnarled old oaks. In fact Portugal produces 50 % of the world’s cork. And I’ve read that some can live to be 500 years old. Hey, that means than some of these might have felt the ground shudder in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755!!

Last Saturday we were out on a farm in the Alentejo, about an hour and a half drive east of Lisbon. Jan and Elisabeth Anema are Dutch and had sold their farm in Holland and moved here some twenty years ago because they felt God telling them to do so. They believe that being a Cristian is not just about preaching and reading the Bible. It should invade your whole life and affect all that you are and do. They combine dairy farming with pastoral counselling (Elisabeth is a trained counsellor) and a range of social and educational activities You can read more about all that they are involved in by clicking on http://www.anema.com.pt/root_ing.htm

It was our first weekend away from Lisbon, and the peace of the rural environment was so refreshing. But it was the cork trees that gripped my imagination. They were dotted all over Jan’s land, and the cork bark had just been harvested. Wonderfully gnarled old trees all bearing the scars of their bark being stripped away. The deep orange of the denuded trunks stood out in marked contrast to the rest of the landscape. Now they’ve nine more years to recover their skins and build up another thick layer of springy cork to pop into your champagne bottles ( and provide for a whole lot of other uses you probably never dreamed of – think clarinets and fishing rods for a start)

Anyway if farming is about watching and waiting and hoping and exercising patience, then cork farming probably demonstrates the end of the road as far as those particular virtues go. And a lot of life is like that. James says that perserverance has to finish its work for you to be mature complete, not lacking in anything *. If Jan tries to harvest his cork trees again next November, he’ll get nothing. If the cake doesn’t stay in the oven the full 45 minutes, it will flop. And I know that in so much of my life, when I want things to move a long a little faster, that God has his own timing. It simply won't work if I try to rush things. It never has in the past. I just need to learn to wait.

* James 1:4