Roots

A lot is going on when you don’t think anything is going on.
– Douglas Steere

It’s no secret that I spent most of my life traveling from goal to goal, milestone to milestone, in ways that were visible, competitive, or lucrative in career and social spheres. Competition and performance bring out the best in me. But much of life now involves living in a way completely antithetical to that: doing repetitive, unintellectually-stimulating, unseen work with no immediate reward. And that’s hard. It’s hard to wake up every morning to the same unseen labors. 

Maybe that’s why Proverbs 12:12 caught my eye this morning:

Whoever is wicked covets the spoil of evildoers,
but the root of the righteous bears fruit.

What I want are spoils: visible, immediate results that feel good. The Hebrew word here literally means “net” or “snare”—there is a sense in which these spoils are captured through intentional manipulation and machination. Through human orchestration, and not in a good way. But these spoils are what we want; they are what make other people look good or happy. They are what we covet.

But when we are right-with-God, what we have are not spoils, but roots. And roots are fascinating. First of all, roots are unseen. They are hidden, underground: they travel and work and change in ways we absolutely cannot see, smell, touch, hear, or feel. Roots have been known to grow as deep as a tree is tall. They form vast networks (what some have deemed the “wood wide web”) through which trees communicate and even exchange nutrients with each other. Roots store centuries of experience and withstand severe climate changes. They are in charge of all the chemical activity in the tree, absorbing, transporting, and storing nutrients. They ground the organisms they are part of, anchoring them in place. “Roots,” writes Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees, “are the most important part of a tree.”

Unlike spoils, roots do not inspire coveting, but bearing. If coveting is wishing you had something, bearing is knowing you will create something. If coveting is looking always to others, bearing is what arises from within. If coveting is wanting to acquire, bearing is allowing yourself to become. If coveting makes you struggle or strategize to obtain, bearing is a nearly-involuntary process, a biological promise. And the bearing, this verse tells us, comes from the roots. It’s from what is completely hidden and unseen that the fruit comes, and at just the right time. No sooner, no later.

Perhaps there is a bit of word play here, because roots form a “net” as well. There are two nets here: one above ground, and one below it. One flashy, coveted, and immediate; one unseen, unacknowledged, and forming slowly over time. But the more I am bent towards being right with and before God, the more I value the roots, the more I understand the promise of the fruit. The more I see that the spiritual life will inevitably include periods of boredom or staleness, when it seems and feels for all the world like nothing is happening, when I simply have to continue faithfully doing what I’ve done before.