A Labor of Love

Last week I visited a sugar shack. Prior to this I had no idea what a sugar shack was, so if you’re wondering right now what a sugar shack is don’t feel bad. A sugar shack is a small building where the sap from maple trees is magically transformed into delicious maple syrup. Alright, so it’s something short of magic, but I find the whole process of taking the life-blood of a tree and making it into the sweet stuff I put on my pancakes for breakfast absolutely fascinating. The process begins by taping maple trees and then collecting the sap into buckets that hang from the taps. Then the sap is poured into a metal basin called an evaporator. The evaporator sits on top of a giant wood burning stove and essentially boils down the sap until you have nothing left except the finest syrup you’ve ever tasted. What I find most fascinating about the whole process is the fact that it takes 40 gallons of sap to yield 1 gallon of syrup. It’s definitely a lot of sap and a lot of work for not a lot of syrup. No wonder practitioners of this trade call it a labor of love. If you have supplied me the courtesy of reading thus far you are probably wondering why I think anyone should share my fascination for maple syrup production. But I find maple syrup production to be a great example of how some things in life are worth our devotion despite the seemingly small return. For me this would be youth ministry. Sometimes I feel like all my lesson preparation, program planning, phone calls, and conversations over lunch bear little fruit in the end. However, like maple sap, when it’s all boiled down, the realization of lives being changed is very sweet.