Roots 3

When is something really dead and when is it, like Wesley in The Princess Bride, only mostly dead?

This wasn’t a good year for observing the effects of drought in South-western Ontario, but there have been years when everything looked dead and dried up. However when is something really dead and when does it just appear to be dead but is just adapting to the climate for survival?

And on a side note, why is it that weeds never seem to die and just the plants I want to keep? While I am on side notes why is it that grass grows great in the cracks of my patio where there is no soil and not in the empty patches in my front yard?

Sorry, I got carried away.

Just think about a time when your front lawn turned from green to brown after suffering through an extended dry spell. Was the grass really dead, as we often say, or only mostly dead? In fact the grass wasn’t actually dead but adapting itself to the drought in order to survive. If we dig down and look at the roots we see that the plants themselves are very much alive and even burrowing deeper into the soil looking for life-giving moisture. It is not only grass that does that but also most botanical organisms. They dig deeper and grow stronger when faced with challenging environmental conditions. Plants want to survive and thrive. By nature plants are geared to grow. Is it the same with all people?

Over the years I have watched people struggle and often submit to challenging situations. For all intents and purposes they die, or at least something dies within them and they give up living. Some of the most frequent victims of this unnatural phenomenon are people who have grown up dependent on other people and in some sense have existed in vicarious, almost parasitic relationships. When called upon to survive on their own, after the host has moved on, these people have no roots to speak of and, rather than learn and develop the resources necessary to survive and thrive, they give up and expect others to live for them, or they just live dying.

I have watched the same thing happen in the church. I have seen people go through life relatively unscathed and everything seems great until some sort of tragedy or setback hits. Most of the time I just expect that they, like grass, will rely upon their spiritual roots and dig deeper and find nourishment in their faith. I just expect that the faith they have professed for years will automatically kick in and carry them through the drought. However that isn’t always the case and some people instead of digging down actually pull up their spiritual roots and blame God and the church for not taking better care of them. The tragedy is that if they can actually pull up their spiritual roots, they probably didn’t have any to speak of in the first place and they were just living vicariously through others.

So when is someone spiritually dead and when is someone only partially dead? I would suggest that when challenges drive people away from God and His guidelines for holy living that a person could be considered dead, at least to Christ, and in need of repentance. However when circumstances challenge a person to call on God, even question God and wrestle with God, then that person is really still alive and just digging deeper to find the life-giving nourishment that only God can provide for those who earnestly seek after Him.

The lesson in this is that problems and challenges actually have a purpose and that is to drive our roots deeper into the ground of our faith. Jesus was very clear that he would never leave us nor forsake us and he would never give us more than we could bear but would always give us what we need to stand up under the challenge. The qualifier is that in order to stand after you have been knocked down is that you actually have to pick yourself up. If you just lay there you may never know if what Jesus said is true or not.