Rooted · Week 1 · Sunday

Rooted

New series. Same taproot.

A while back, Fruitful taught us to grow the fruit of the Spirit instead of feeding the flesh. Love, joy, peace, and the rest, chosen on purpose in the small moments. Rooted picks up right where that left off and asks a harder question. What happens to that fruit when the weather turns? Because it will turn. It always turns.

Here is the one thing none of us gets a vote on.

We don’t choose whether the storm comes. We choose who we become in it.

We do not get to choose whether pain comes into our lives. The diagnosis, the layoff, the wayward kid, the marriage that got hard, the loss that levels us. None of that is up to us. The only thing we actually get to choose is who we become in the middle of it.

Count It Joy

Count it joy. Now, that sounds impossible until you understand what joy actually is. Joy is not happiness. Happiness depends on what is happening, and when the storm hits, happiness is the first thing to blow away. Joy is different. Joy is the power to endure hard things, the deep-down hope that holds when nothing around you is happy. You can have zero happiness and still be full of joy at the same time, because joy is not tied to the weather. It is tied to God.

And a trial is exactly where it grows. James says the testing of your faith produces something. The Greek word for testing, dokimion, is a metalworking word. It is what you do to gold, heating it until the impurities rise to the top and burn off, so that what is left is pure. The fire was never meant to destroy the gold. It was meant to prove it and purify it.

The Goal Was Never to Pass

That reframes everything about a hard season. We tend to treat trials like a test to survive, white-knuckling toward the day it is finally over so we can get back to normal. But look at what James actually says the goal is.

The goal is not to pass the test. The goal is to be purified by it. To come out the other side more complete, more like Jesus, lacking nothing. If all we do is grit our teeth and get through, we waste the very thing the fire was trying to give us.

Where Roots Come From

Rooted. Here is what every gardener knows and every anxious parent forgets. A tree does not grow its roots during the storm. It grows them in the ordinary, unremarkable days, quietly, underground, so that when the wind finally comes, it already holds. The holding is decided long before the storm ever arrives.

That is the whole picture for our families. What anchors our kids in the storm of the culture is not how loud we are above the ground, not the rules or the lectures or the sheer volume. It is how deep the roots go underneath, the unseen life with God that we grow in them and in ourselves on the ordinary days. This week we sink roots into the first fruit that holds in a storm. Joy.

The storm doesn’t get to decide who you become.

Tomorrow · Trust Over Control