Words by Bev Jones
Roots
A couple of years ago at the end of Spring, one of the fields around the local reservoir caught fire. The result was devastating and looked horrendous. The fields on either side were green and luscious, but this was charred and black and ugly - it appeared to be totally dead. Walking around it the day after it happened it was just a pile of burnt grass blackened to a crisp.
A week later, I was up there again, and from a distance, it still looked dead and charred. However, once you got up close, and walked around the boundary wall, you could just about see the faintest hint of green in a couple of places - very well buried and you had to look hard, but it was there nevertheless. The following week, again from a distance – dead, but up close, even more tiny green shoots. Gradually over the weeks, the green shoots became more evident, and by the end of summer, the whole field was coming back to life. The green shoots won out, and new life from the blackened crisp emerged.
Photo by Azlan Baharudin via Unsplash
The interesting thing then was that when you looked at the fields on either side that had previously looked luscious, in comparison to the new growth of the burnt field, the grass in both of those was quite tough and very inflexible. It certainly didn’t sway in the breeze.
The field that had been decimated was, at the end of the season, a lovely mass of green tender shoots that swayed as the wind blew through them. The fire had obviously not damaged the root system and so new growth was inevitable, but this field was better than it had been before – and continues to this day still to be the brightest most verdant field.
A lesson perhaps that whatever we go through, the important thing is our root system. If our roots remain in God, we will emerge stronger from the difficult seasons and be more willing to trust in the future because He’s been faithful before. In these present times, we can be forgiven for thinking that everything looks charred and decimated, but if we engage at the deepest, most intimate level with God, immersing ourselves in His word, the shoots of new opportunity will germinate and grow as we invite the Holy Spirit to move more freely through us.
- Bev Jones
01/4/20
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