Do Not Sever Your Roots

“She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” Proverbs 3:18

Dearest Daughters,

Lots of people talk about agricultural sustainability, but very few focus on the sustainability of relationships, marriages, and communities. And that is the most important sustainability of all.

I was recently in a meeting where I heard a man say that he personally knew twenty-four people whose adult children had “canceled” them. Until the last few years, I’d never even heard that term used in this way, and I find it deeply grievous. It is the sign of a failing culture. If there’s no sustainability in relationships and no continuity between generations, then we have lost life itself.

So what does it take to create relational durability?

First, I believe it’s a question of identity.

Second, we must recognize our place in both eternity and in history.

God did not create us as individuals to be the whole picture of His purpose or even our own purpose. We were designed to be connected to a whole much larger than ourselves. We’re connected to the roots, the trunk, and to the preceding branches. If we sever this connection, how can we produce fruit? Only God is all in all, and each generation is one step closer to the harvest He is cultivating.

Let me begin with identity.

I’ve often heard people ask, “Was it hard for you to give up your career, your dreams, or your previous life to become a mother?”

For me, no. Once I really understood motherhood to be my calling, I couldn’t imagine anything more important in the world. Motherhood is not a detour that I must quickly get out of the way before proceeding to my real future. It was my future!

I saw being a mother as how the kingdom of God would continue coming again and again upon the earth, generation after generation.

To stand in the place of motherhood was, to me, to take hold of a story stretching all the way from the faith of Abraham—through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed—to the returning of the Lord. And if we all do our parts at imparting faith from one generation to the next, it can be an answer to the question of whether He would still find faith upon the earth.

We know the kingdoms of self-centeredness, broken families, dissolved relationships, and fragmentation are definitely flourishing! But I wanted to see the kingdom of heaven flourish also, that kingdom of love, faithfulness, sacrifice, and thriving life. Motherhood was my big opportunity to participate in that work.

So if motherhood is your calling, don’t view it as an isolated or temporary identity but as part of the future itself. Look at it as determining whether there will still be a people of faith standing upon the earth when your grandchildren are born . . . and when your great-grandchildren are born.

We must think long-term!

We’ve been trained by a culture of “click here,” “swipe there,” and to think in short-term fragments that are immediate and short, but you must learn to think generationally.

Look back into the past:

Why did my ancestors come to this country?

What were they longing for?

What sacrifices did they make?

Then look forward:

What will I leave behind for my grandchildren’s children?

What kind of spiritual, relational, and cultural inheritance will I leave for my descendants after I’m gone?

If you think this way, your parenting will be rooted in a vision rather than wasting it in constant reaction, and your family will have roots that are deep enough to endure storms.

And this brings me to generations. No generation in and of itself, and certainly no individual, should be all in all. That’s who Christ is. He alone fills all in all. He was before time began, and He will remain after time ends.

I think of history like a tree planted from a seed. The roots go deep into the earth, carrying out their unseen job. Without them, the tree would certainly die. Yet we don’t look at the roots expecting fruit, and neither do we find fruit in the trunk, or even in the earliest branches.

So it’s futile to look back at your parents or grandparents and complain that they didn’t bear the fruit that perhaps your generation was intended to bear. When we compare one generation to another in this way, we misunderstand what God is doing across history.

Every time we sever ourselves from the generation before us, we cut ourselves off from the roots. And when branches lose connection to the roots, the leaves begin to wither.

I believe much of the rejection of previous generations comes from a loss of vision and identity. People no longer understand that humanity itself was meant to be on a journey back toward God—back toward the wholeness we lost in the Garden when mankind chose autonomy over surrendered relationship with their Creator.

Every act of relational severing becomes a participation in fragmentation, death, and entropy. It’s just another bite from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and deciding for ourselves rather than surrendering ourselves into the Tree of Life.

And yet it is those ancient roots, however tangled, scarred, or gnarled they may appear, that still nourish us. It is that old trunk, no matter how imperfect or weathered, that still supports us.

May God help us to give thanks for the generations that came before us. No matter their failures, we would not exist without them.

That honor for one’s roots is something I always admired about my father.

His own father was a deeply broken man who tragically eventually ended his own life, and yet my father still spoke of him with kindness and honor. I never heard him speak with bitterness, though he certainly did not condone the things he had done.

My father believed that his father had given him life. He had ridden the rails and eventually settled in Texas, where my father would one day encounter God. And to my father, that was enough reason to give thanks and honor his memory.

Do not sever yourself from the roots, or you may one day find your own branches barren.

“When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?” — Luke 18:8

With all my love,

Mom