Importance of trees to Man
Have you ever thought of the importance of trees around us, in our life? We see them everyday and probably we didn't attach much of attention to them. They provide us with fruits and vegetables to eat and firewood to burn. Besides these, trees provide important raw materials for our industries.
Have you ever seen a place with many trees? You can't but wonder about how beautiful and cool the place will be. We build houses and make furniture with timber. Where would the books come from without paper? The pulp for making paper is provided by trees. When we think of trees, we think of their cool shade. The children play around the trees and tired travellers rest under them.
Trees are not only meant for giving us fruits furniture and paper alone. They also support the life of living things. They replace the oxygen that gets used up when living things breathe or burn anything. Trees gives out oxygen to man. Infact, even the meat that man eats is provided by plant eating animals.
Tigers and lions also feed on deer which eats plants. Thus, plants supply us two most important requirements of life, namely oxygen to breathe and food to eat.
Trees also cause rainfall. The leaves of the trees breathe our a lot of water vapour into the atmosphere. This helps to make the air cool. That is why, on a hot day, it is always cooler under trees than inside a room. The cool air over forests cools the rain clouds and helps to cause rain. This explains why rainfall over forest areas is greater than in other places.
Trees hold the soil together and help to prevent erosion. They save it from washing away by showers. Our earth has a covering of fine soil on the surface. Under the soul, lie rocks. This soil cover helps plants and grasses to grow. Their roots hold the soil together.
Trees keep the environment clean. They absorb harmful carbon dioxide from the air and fill the atmosphere with precious life sustaining oxygen. In this way, they reduce air pollution. Therefore, we can say trees are the lungs of nature. Trees provide us with many useful things. They give us grains, fruits, vegetables and medicines. Trees provide herbs and other medicinal materials for the cure of human infection and diseases. In the ancient days, there are some trees that cures malaria when turned to herbs . The branches of trees also serve as home to millions of birds. Forests give shelter to innumerable wild animals. The green leaves and grass refresh our eyes and minds.
Many times ago, a large portion of our country was covered with forests. With the passage of time, as the population grew, man cut down trees to get more and more land for agriculture, houses and industries. People practice deforestation without thinking of the future. Hence, a great part of our forest resources has been lost. We must take the initiative to plant trees all over the country. Since trees are our national wealth, we should do our best to save them.
Trees are the most long lived living things on the earth. They are also as same as we are. You might feel that plants are non living things just because they do not move or make sound. But actually trees breathe, eat, grow and also give birth to new plants. They can also feel. The touch-me-not plant folds its leaves and even draws itself back from human touch. We find different kinds of trees. Trees are of different shapes and sizes. There are big trees as well as small ones. There are trees, shrubs, herbs, creepers and climbers which are all useful and beneficial to man.
The evils of jealousy
Jealousy is resentment towrds someone for a feeling of advantage of superiority they hold, or even for certain achievements. Jealousy brings hatred instead of progress; if you are jealous of a friend, you will look for the downfall of such friend. The best thing to do is to avoid being jealous of another person. As children of God, you must stay away and keep away from bad intention to harm anyone who has an advantage, superiority or achievement over you. You should not get jealous to the point of having or carrying out evil plans against others.
Jealousy can be evil when;
1. It leads to unhealthy competition with others and the only alternative you think of is to do evil against them.
2. It leads to unnecessary envy of the success and progress of others
3. It leads to strife with others over things that are meaningless and purposeless
4. You wish to become the head and best among others by evil means
5. You begin to feel insecure
6. It generates fear, anger, resentment, inadequacy, hopelessness.
Negative effects of jealousy
Jealousy has the power to affect one psychologically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually in the following ways.
1. Decreasing someone's perceived self worth: when you become unnecessarily jealous of another person, you are devaluing yourself and you place yourself at a very low self-esteem and your worth as a person will be decreasing.
2. Emotional instability
Jealousy will destabilize you emotionally because whenever you see the person you are jealous of, your mood will change and you will be nurturing hatred which is not good for your health
3. Broken relationship
If you are jealous of your friends, your relationship with the person will never grow. The relationship will be broken and this will have a negative effect on how you relate with people
4. Depression
You will be depressed and frustrated if you are jealous of somebody and the person keeps succeeding. No matter how you try to outrun the person you will always feel down
How to avoid the evil of jealousy
1. Be born again. The first step to avoid jealousy is for you to be a genuine child of God and surrender your totality to Jesus Christ. Christ will save you from every work of the flesh
2. Seek the help of the holy spirit. Jesus Christ promised to give us the holy spirit to guide and direct us. Through the help of the holy spirit, you can avoid jealousy
3. Control your mind. Let your mind be under control; do not covet anybody's achievement or possessions. Take your mind away from what brings jealousy and focus on what makes you better.
4. Seek advice. Talk to a godly counselor about it. Do not seek counsel from someone who will mislead you but seek wise counsel from godly people
5. Practice these principles to distract yourself from jealous feeling, thought and action
1. Write down on paper what/how you feel
2. Write down what you want
3. Take a walk from the situation
4. Put someone else in your shoe and try to give godly counsel
5. See yourself as God will do and act so that God will be pleased.
Jealousy most times cannot be avoided but it should not lead to evil behavior and practices that will endanger someone else's life as a result of your insecurity and inferiority. You must understand that you are unique and special in your own way, so is everyone on earth. Therefore, there is no need to be jealous of anyone.
Good fruits of Patience; God and the Impatient monkey
Patience is a virtue which brings great rewards, unfortunately not everyone possess this virtue. Patience as a virtue is the ability to endure even in the most unfavourable or darkest moments. Having patience as an individual will help us greatly as people always say that the patient dog eats the fattest bone. Sometimes life have something big for us but we are not always patient to receive it. A person seeking for job was asked to wait for some hours before his interviewer arrive, he shrugged it off and went back home, insisting he cannot wait. Indeed he can't be employed since he is not patient enough. As the popular Yoruba adage which says there's no such thing as too much of patience except it's still not enough. This is to show the fact that patience is an indispensable virtue we all need as human beings, it's a virtue we have to apply in every areas of life, either in workplace, in social relationships and much more, patience is always needed.
Always be patient and ascertain the truth before concluding. Some people just bump into issues without examining them carefully before making decisions. That child that's not doing well in school, have you taken out your time and patience in understanding why the child is performing low in school, some of us are always hasty in making conclusions, such like concluding that the child is a dullard and things relating to that. A person is not made in a day, it requires patience, hard work among others. Even you need to be patient for a plant to grow. This is to show that all of us have time to grow and develop, don't just be too hasty to overrun your time.
There's this African story which teaches about the importance of being patient that I love so much. It's actually a story about a monkey who desired so much to become a human. It always envy human beings because of their intelligence and how they do things, he marveled at their beauties, how they love to celebrate and merry on good occasions. He then decided to go before God to explain its plight to him. On getting to the Almighty, it blurted out its frustrations as an animal and how life has been difficult for him, he told God how he has always loved to become a human as he fancy their ways.
Without much ado, God told him he could actually become a human that he desired, the monkey was so happy to hear that God has already wanted to make him a human. So God told him to go home and hide itself for seven days without seeing anybody. God told him that during those seven days he should not appear to anyone as God doesn't want anyone to see how it will be transformed into human. This is the condition set before the monkey. The monkey thanked God profusely and promised to abide by the rules given to him by the Almighty.
He went home and start to live a confined life for seven days as ordered by the Almighty. The first day went by and good, the second day gone so was the third day. On the fourth day of staying in his house without going out, some of his friends came to visit and to inquire of him the reason for his absence in the community for some days back but this monkey won't open the door for them to see him, they went away after some futile knocking without any response.
On the sixth day, there was a wedding ceremony of one of the daughters of the king of the land. Important personalities were invited and dignitaries were not left out too. Music was blazing loud too and people were happy. Monkey on hearing the sound of music was so happy to hear a ceremony going on at the palace. Without much ado, he put on his best cloth and went out to witness the grand occasion forgetting the warning given to him by God not to ever get out of the house until after the seventh day.
On getting to the occasion he started shouting to anyone who cares to listen to him on how he will become a human soon. He was happy and started jumping around, biting people and telling them how soon it will be when he is going to become like them. This angered God that he decided not to make monkey become human again. The seventh day came and monkey eventually realized how impatience has costed him so much. Out of this shame, he decided to leave the community for the forest and he has been living there ever since.
He was inpatient with himself and as a result of that, it could not reach his goal of becoming a human. Let's learn to be patient, to be endure and believe for the best.
