The man looked me straight in the eye and flat-out told me: 

Cut yourself off from what truly delivers sustenance — and nothing can truly deliver you. 

“I didn’t send you a sympathy card to mark the one year anniversary since your Dad was killed, and I didn’t send you cut flowers for graduating with your masters from Wheaton. But I packed my bags and I came. I came to plant you a garden.”

He came over 4,000 km last May with a hat and gloves and a precisely folded list of flowers that he’d researched that were up to the task of weathering my harsh winters. I kneeled beside him as Bill bent down and turned our earth, because the man knew that the soul, more than anything, needs the gift of rootedness in a world of cutting and slashing, hacking and severing and being detatched from whence we came. 

When I tucked our littlest girl into bed last week, she turned toward the windowsill by her bed and bemoaned the dying flowers browning and drooping there in a cup she’d filled with water right to the brim. 

“No matter how much water I keep putting in this cup – all these flowers still just keep getting browner,” she swept dry, crumpled petals from along the windowsill into her hand and held them out toward me like proof. 

“Adding dirt and water does not equal roots. Life is more than just add water and dirt — every life needs roots. Why add all kinds of nutrients to your life, if you negate the source of your life? “

“Oh, Sweet – this is a cup of cut flowers,” I tucked one of her strands of hair behind her ear. “Cut flowers aren’t planted in dirt – so they eventually die, no matter how much you water them.”

And with that, she slipped out of her bed with dead petals in hand, and I’d assumed she meant to patter barefoot out to the kitchen to let the dead petals fall soundlessly into the garbage can – but in a moment she’d pattered back with a cupful of dirt she’d scooped out of the potted citrus tree. She sprinkled  the dirt into her cup of flowers. 

“There! Dirt!” She grinned – and I felt cut to the quick. 

Adding dirt and water does not equal roots. 

Life is more than just add water and dirt — every life needs roots. 

Why add all kinds of nutrients to your life, if you negate the source of your life? 

Last spring, when Bill and I were working on planting my flower garden out beside the front porch, the researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible were pouring over the year’s survey statistics, and finding “it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year…. ‘We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,’ John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. ‘What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.’”

Cut yourself off from the source of your life — and eventually it’s impossible to fake your life. 

Cut yourself off from what truly delivers sustenance — and nothing can truly deliver you. 

Workouts can only do so much if you don’t get the Word in. Eating clean isn’t the same as feasting on Living Bread for a soul cleanse. Lifting weights can only go so far, when it’s the  Word Himself who can lift the weight of all your burdens and carry you all the way through. 

“Blooms may be strikingly visual – but it’s roots that are decisively vital.“

Sever your roots and all the water and dirt in the world still won’t revive you. 

Great optics is not organic growth. In this day and age, the two are too easily conflated. 

Yet regardless of what any flashy screens or loud social streams or any pontificating huckster may be trying to convince the masses: 

You need deep roots, not  mere blooms, for real growth. 

Blooms may be strikingly visual – but it’s roots that are decisively vital.

I pass by  our little one’s watered and dirt sprinkled cup of very dead flowers every time I slip out to weed and water that flower garden my friend, Bill, and I toiled over last year, that’s now in full bloom this year. 

“Humanity’s relationship began with God in a garden and a garden is where the soul’s relationship with God only grows deeper.  “

The delphiniums along the picket fence shoot blue flame torches up into summer afternoons, and  trumpeting yellow lilies keep heralding hope. 

And all summer long, it’s this garden I  keep retreating to when I need to find hope. Early morning, with a cup of coffee in one hand and the Word and journal in the other, or midday when the heat of all kinds of life challenges beg for the reprieve of stillness amongst blooms to know God is still on the throne, or at the end of the day when I at last fall into the front porch swing overlooking the flower garden, and linger a bit with my Maker in the cool of the evening. 

In the garden, it’s one’s own soul that flourishes. 

It can become one’s own rite of passage through summer: Go with hope to the garden where the roots underneath all the things prove that what you need to thrive is happening underneath all that you can see right now. Breathe in the glory of blooms. Rest in God. It’s the garden that grounds the soul in God, roots it in the Source, anchors one in a place to be still to hear Him speak. Humanity’s relationship began with God in a garden and a garden is where the soul’s relationship with God only grows deeper.

“Tending a garden is tending to your future self. In the garden, it’s one’s own soul that flourishes. “

There, God walks and talks, there “the Lord will continually guide you… and give strength to your bones; and you will be like a watered garden” Isaiah 58:11.

I’m not sure at what point I said it to my farmer husband, who well knows the worth of good roots and dirt: 

Tending a garden is tending to your future self. 

Caring for a garden today is caring for your future heartbroken self. 

Nurture roots today –  so it’s your soul that’s nurtured by many blooms tomorrow.

“What is hidden underneath the surface of things is what determines whether you go under or not. “

I’m not sure at what point the shift happened in our communities, but apparently: “One in four Americans has never read more than a few sentences of Scripture… and only 10 percent of Americans report any daily Bible reading at all.”

There is a whole world dying for lack of roots, who keep adding all kinds of touted nutrients to our lives but aren’t anchored and rooted in that which can feed the souls. Who cares enough to cultivate more spaces to open the Word and be rooted in God?

Unless a life is rooted in the Word, a life is slowly dying. Unless the focus is more on roots than blooms, there is no way to thrive.  What is hidden underneath the surface of things is what determines whether you go under or not. “Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:7).  Then you’ll be able to withstand any and all of the winds and heat and crises to come. 

Digging into the Word is rooting  yourself in the only reality that can dig you out of what overwhelms tomorrow. 

The garden’s warm early first thing in the morning and finding a place amongst roots and blooms to simply open the Word and meet with the Maker is not only an interior remaking, a return to Eden, but a way to nourish your future self, to ensure you flourish.  

Tend to your spiritual roots today is tending to your future self.  

Digging into the Word is rooting  yourself in the only reality that can dig you out of what overwhelms tomorrow. 

Plant your life in the Word – and it’s  your life that becomes the garden that blooms in ways you always dreamed of. 

I send pictures of the garden’s new blooms to Bill on the other side of the country, because  the man who came to plant me a garden knows how  “the soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all,” as the essayist and farmer Wendell Berry wrote.  

Dust we are and to dust we shall return, but why would that cause any fear if the soul is genuinely rooted in Christ, the source and destination of us all?   

Just last week, one of the heritage roses that had exposed roots, I planted it deeper, and it now looks about ready to bloom. 

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