A teenager, I notice our midwinter pecan tree’s bare-branched ostensions to the sky. For the first time, I see that its limbs and fingers look like an inverted root structure—as if the whole were extracted then replanted upside-down by a mischievous Olympian (perhaps Hermes); or as if I had unwittingly slipped into Hades’ realm, viewing the tree from the side of the ground opposite my routine. In either case, seeing the tree’s shape before me as roots, I envision its branches extending into the ground, or as it would be in my re-imagined world, the atmosphere beneath my feet.
The Bible’s narrative extends and spreads both down into history and up into the future from its singular center, its trunk—the Messiah. At the bottom of the root structure is the full expanse of creation itself: the heavens and the earth. At the top of its canopy are leaves from every corner of that creation. Top to bottom: “every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord….”
Your faith’s roots divide into parents and friends, mentors and models, diverging iteratively downward through the sources of their faith, obscured by the opaque but nurturing soils of history. The limbs are those who will draw faith from yours; their branches those who will draw faith from theirs, perhaps hidden to our fixed position but openly visible to the future. As Paul describes it to the young pastor in Ephesus: “…and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”
This week, as we draw faith from the complex web of our roots, may every person we meet receive it freely from us.