Rooted and grounded in love
The tree by the water
Two trees stand in the same field when the dry year comes. The sun beats down the same on both, the rain holds off from both, the heat presses in from every side without favoring either one. But watch what happens as the drought drags on. The first tree, whose roots never went down far, browns at the edges, curls, drops its leaves, gives up its fruit; it lived off the surface, and the surface has failed it. The second tree seems hardly to notice the year at all. Its leaves stay green, it keeps setting fruit, because long before the heat ever came it sent its roots down and out, deep and patient, until they reached the river that runs underground where no drought reaches. Jeremiah draws that very picture: a tree planted by the waters, spreading its roots by the river, that will not fear when heat comes. And Paul names what the river is for the soul. Be rooted and grounded in love, he prays, with the love of Christ dwelling deep in your heart. This is the whole aim toward which the reconnecting season has been bending. Not a tree the heat will never touch. A tree whose roots have gone down far enough that the heat cannot win.
“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith... being rooted and grounded in love.”
— Paul, to the Ephesians — Ephesians 3:17 (WEB)
“For he will be as a tree planted by the waters, who spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes, but its leaf will be green, and will not cease from yielding fruit.”
Reconnect comes to its signature image here: roots driven so deep into the love of God that the next drought cannot finish you. Jeremiah's tree by the river does not fear the heat, because it found the water underground long before. Paul prays you would be rooted and grounded in love, with Christ dwelling deep in your heart. Re-rooting is exactly this, not a faith that escapes all heat, but one rooted deep enough that when the heat returns, the leaf stays green.
You cannot promise yourself the heat will never come again; droughts return, and pretending otherwise only sets you up to break. What you can do, in this watered season, is sink your roots. Paul prays that you would be rooted and grounded in love, that Christ would dwell deep in your heart, until you become like the tree planted by the river, green in the heat, fruitful in the drought, because your roots have quietly found the water that runs underground. To be rooted and grounded simply means to grow your life down into the love of God until that love, and not your circumstances, is what holds you up.
This is the point of the whole reconnecting season, and it is gentler and more realistic than the promise you might have wished for. Not a life with no more hard summers. A root system deep enough to outlast them. So give yourself, now, in the watered season, to going deep, because roots are grown before the drought, not during it. Sink them into His love while the river is near, and when the heat comes again, and it will, your leaf will stay green.
Whole eras of the Church have produced shallow-rooted Christianity that flourished while the culture was favorable and browned at the first real heat, mistaking busy surface growth, full pews and cultural clout, for depth. When the season turns dry, as it has across the Western Church now, the shallow growth withers fast. The recurring upheaval is, in part, a drought that exposes how far the Body's roots actually went. The aim Paul prays for is deeper: a people rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, drawing on the river that runs beneath every dry year. Before a watching world, the traditions and movements that endure are not the ones spared the heat but the ones whose roots reached the water. Depth, not the absence of drought, is what holds the Church green.
The heat will come again; no faith is promised a field without summers. What cannot be shaken is the river the roots have found, the love of Christ that runs deeper than any drought and does not dry up when the surface does. A tree rooted there stays green not because the heat spares it, but because its roots reached water the heat cannot touch. The love holds when nothing else does.
- Am I waiting for a life without heat, or growing roots deep enough to outlast the heat when it comes?
- How deep have my roots actually gone into the love of God, beneath my changing circumstances?
- What would it look like, in this watered season, to sink roots now rather than scramble for them in the next drought?
Lord, I would love a field with no more dry summers, but You offer something better and truer. Root me and ground me in Your love. Let Christ dwell so deep in my heart that my roots reach the river that runs beneath every drought. I cannot keep the heat from coming, but You can hold me green within it. Sink me down into Your love while the water is near. Amen.