Some eyebrows were raised when a local minister showed up to a tree-planting ceremony holding an ax.
But the ax, and the “chopping” motion he made toward the pin oak, turned out to be part of the sermon the Rev. Gilford Bisjak was delivering.
“I cannot tell a lie, I did not chop down this tree,” the pastor at Zion United Church of Christ said at the Wednesday, July 15, planting along the banks of City Lake in Union.
Bisjak told the dozen people gathered around the tree that there’s a place for an ax, such as in the overgrown forests in California, where the abundance of trees became a fire hazard.
“So there’s a place for an ax, but there’s a place to plant and grow trees,” he said. Read more here