It’s often said that the roots of a tree are as big underground as its branches are above ground. Yeeeh, no. We’ve all seen trees like this, toppled in storms, showing roots only a foot or two deep. (Don’t ask about the car. That’s another story altogether.)
Why do big trees sometimes have such shallow roots? It’s all to do with where you find your food.
Only the top couple of feet of the ground is soil; below that is clay and rock. Most roots are in this top layer because that’s where the nutrients are. If the soil is shallower, the roots will be too.
The exception to this is desert. Here, the top layer of soil is very poor in food, and even poorer in the wet stuff, so trees may send down long tap roots to find the water table. (That’s where you’d dig a well down to.) They can survive drought because they are drinking from a permanent supply deep underground.
Fun facticle: The deepest roots ever recorded belong to a wild fig tree in Echo Caves, Transvaal, South Africa. The tap root reaches down 122m, almost 400 feet.
“Lovely,” you say. “I now know more about tree root balls than I ever wished to know.” What? You thought I was talking about horticulture? No, this is about you and me. Both Jeremiah and the psalmist know we are like trees – hopefully ones with a good water supply
Water was more of an issue in Bible lands than in perma-drizzle Britain, so having access to reliable supply is a powerful picture. Nothing less than life and death. If you’re in any doubt, check out a satellite image of Egypt. The green ribbon along the Nile is clearly visible from space, cutting through the desert like a thousand-mile oasis.
Where do we get our water from? Is it from the topsoil, from the rain and the hose pipe? That’s OK until there’s a drought. (Yes, overseas readers, we do get droughts in the UK – weird, I know.) Or are we tapped into something more permanent, more reliable?
Each of us may be planted in rich soil or poor. Our day to day may be sustained by fulfilling work, by friends, hobbies and family, or it we might be toiling under duty, slog and simply getting through each day.
If it’s the former, and the rich topsoil is providing all we need right now, we can be fooled into thinking that it’s all we’ll ever need (check out Prov 30:7-9). But we all need deeper roots, a place to go when the storms rage, a strong root sinking into the water table, hundreds of metres below.
Two things I ask of you, Lord;
do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
give me neither poverty nor riches,
but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonour the name of my God.
For the Christian, when all the blessings of happenstance are stripped away, when the soil desiccates and turns to sand, when the superficial roots are exposed, that’s when we realise what is keeping us alive, keeping us upright, and it’s the deep root that is anchored way down, feeding on God.
Job discovered this the hard way. I love the end of his story, when he gets no answer to the questions that fill the previous 40-odd chapters but finds his root and says, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” “It’s OK. I finally get it.”
In Matthew 19 Jesus invited a rich young ruler to find his root, but the young man liked the topsoil too much. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with topsoil and rainwater – God’s blessings are good and I’m grateful for my warm(ish) home and comfy sofa. But life needs more. Trees need more than shallow roots, or we end up with the picture at the top of this post.
I’ll leave you to work out what your version of topsoil and your version of the water table are. To quote my youngest’s favourite county singer, Luke Bryan, ‘Rain is a good thing’. But when it is absent, where are our roots?
Jer 17:8They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.
Ps 1:3They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.
The Reflectionary 