Rooted and grounded in love

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.

You cannot promise yourself the heat will never come again. Droughts return; that is simply true, and pretending otherwise only sets you up to break. What you can do, in this 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 Jeremiah's tree 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.