Returning home was what I knew it would be.
Empty.
Full.
Hating to be there, yet never wanting to leave.
I have spent this week in the company of greatness. Rooted now, remembering the heritage that has gone before me and the childhood laughter that fills gaps of sadness – pushing and pulling me to go on, even when I can’t see where I’m going.
I’ve looked in the eyes of friends I have known a lifetime and know they’ll walk another one with me. I have cried on the shoulders of family, knowing my shoulder will also be needed and ready.
I have kneeled at the foot of a gravesite and shamelessly cried until I physically hurt, knowing full well it was my body just weeks away from being there instead.
With every reason to be washed away by waves of sadness and grief, instead I stood among the most immovable rocks I’ve known in my life, smoothed by the storms and making the most beautiful splash you could ever imagine.
taking root.
The Psalms could have started anywhere. But David started at the root of the matter. He starts with talking about a man’s roots – where it begins – in delighting in God’s laws. Delighting in laws? Who does that? But they’re not the laws in the like terms you and I know them. These laws are like promises. And there’s a whole book full of them. In fact, the book is peppered with one story after another of those promises coming true.
If we choose to believe those promises – those laws – we become like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.
But sometimes, we have to learn to live, even thrive, when the river’s run dry for a while. But how?
I think of the lone tree that grows out of the rocky crag in the Andes Mountains. The evergreen that refuses to go pale even in the harshest winter.
I think of the Joshua Tree. It thrives under scalding heat and in the Mojave Desert’s scorched earth. Its name comes from its appearance of Joshua reaching to heaven in prayer.
It grows fast. Its trunk is tough fiber, so tough it doesn’t even tell you its age like most trees. Its root system is deep and wide, with some roots reaching almost 40 feet away. It can live for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Yeah, that’s the tree I want to be.
This week, I felt the iron fist of cold reality. I felt the searing heat of anger and confusion. But more than that, thankfully, I felt a deepening in my soul’s strength.
Sometimes, we don’t get streams. Sometimes, we have to go to our roots.