Uprooting

People are like trees. The exist to grow, flourish and point to God. Our hearts are like the roots of the tree. They are forever seeking to be firmly established in a life-giving source.

The unformed soul is like a sapling without soil. It knows intuitively that it will dry up, shrivel and die unless its roots find a home. Roots operate like desperate hands forever grasping for some life-giving source in which it can cling to.

This insatiable desire for the human heart to be rooted in something larger than ourselves is universal and explains why everyone is rooted in something. The problem is the where we have planted ourselves. As this picture depicts, a tree can be rooted almost anywhere. This small Maple tree has found its home in a 2x10 rough sawn oak bench. In it's vulnerable state and desperate quest for life a tree will lay down roots into anything that has the slightest resemblance of earth. Sadly, it has become dislocated and despite it's natural inclination to live, it will die.

In the same way, each person in the world has a heart that's been rooted. The problem is where that heart has been planted. Too often we settle for so much less than the rich soil of God's kingdom. Like the sapling, we too will die unless we uproot and are transplanted.

But, ah, herein lies the problem. Roots are attachments. Their job is to establish a firm and safe home. For the small Maple tree, being yanked out of it's established dwelling (as bizarre as a place that it's been planted) must feel like a kind of death is taking place.

The great writer A.W. Tozer puts it well. He writes, "The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution."

Following Jesus ALWAYS involves uprooting. This means there is a process of detachment, and de-establishment from our old established home. This is why Jesus says that if you truly want to live, you must first die.

While the rough-sawn oak cannot sustain life, if it's all we ever knew, and where we have established our source of life, the goodbyes can be painful. It can feel like death. The good news is that although it feels like death, we will ultimately live.

Our sapling lives can be re-established in the right source. We can be transplanted and grow as we never previously knew.

If we want to understand how people have been formed, we must look at where their roots have been established. We must never water-down or minimize this "uprooting" process in discipleship. Rather, we have to give them a wider and deeper vision of where we were meant to be established and live.