Somewhere in Northern California, there's a tree still standing that was already decades old when Christ was a boy in Nazareth.

It's a Coast Redwood. 369 feet tall, which is 64 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Some of the giants in that same grove were young trees two thousand years ago. They've outlasted empires. And they're still growing.

Here's what's strange about a tree that size: you'd expect it to need roots that plunge deep into the earth to hold something so massive upright. It doesn't. A Redwood's roots often reach down only five or six feet, barely deeper than a basement. What they lack in depth, they make up for in width, sometimes spreading 100 feet from the trunk. And in a grove, those roots don't stay separate. They intertwine with the roots of neighboring trees. Some even fuse together.

A tree that tall shouldn't be able to stand on roots that shallow. It stands anyway, because it was never designed to stand alone.

Fed from above, not pulled from below

There's a second surprise. A mature Redwood needs hundreds of gallons of water a day, and you'd assume all of that comes up through those wide, shallow roots. Most of it doesn't. Redwoods pull much of their moisture from fog rolling in off the Pacific, mist settling on their needles hundreds of feet in the air, absorbed from the top down. Pulling that much water up from the ground would cost more energy than the tree could spare. So God designed it to draw the bulk of its nourishment from above instead and the taller the tree grows, the more it can gather.

The higher it reaches, the more it receives. That's backwards from how most things work.

Roots that refuse to stand alone

Put those two things together...fed from above, rooted into everything around it, and you start to see why a 369-foot tree can survive Pacific storms that would flatten almost anything else. It isn't standing on its own strength. It's drawing strength from a source above it, and it's held upright by everything it's tangled up with beneath the surface.

That's not a bad picture of a life that's actually thriving, rather than just performing strength. Nourishment that comes from staying close to God rather than white-knuckling it on your own. Roots that reach toward other people instead of pulling away from them, especially when the storms show up because friends and family were never meant to carry the weight of your soul alone, and neither were you meant to carry theirs. That's not what those roots are for. But intertwined the way they're designed to be, they hold.

"He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." (Psalm 1:1–3)

Look again

A Redwood doesn't grow tall by trying harder. It grows tall by staying rooted, reaching up toward its Source, and out toward everything around it. That's the same shape of life Christ invites us into: not self-sufficiency, but abiding. Not standing alone, but standing held.

Two thousand years from now, will anything about how you lived still be standing?

Until next time,

Michelle

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