Sometimes, We Can’t “Bloom Where We’re Planted…”
It just didn’t grow…
It was a tiny Blue Spruce tree, a seedling just a little smaller than the size of your thumb—given to us as a welcome gift to a new town. We had arrived in the town, and had been there for maybe two weeks, and a couple invited us to a backyard “getting-to-know-you-and-let’s-chill-out” kind of time. They lived on three acres, and the spruce trees were majestic—most were forty and some even fifty feet tall…
So, a tiny seedling, from a seed of one of those stately trees, was offered my son, who promptly took it home and planted it in our back yard…
It just didn’t grow.
We watered it, fertilized it—hey, we even prayed over that tiny tree!
One year, two years, three years—it was hardly an inch bigger than when we received it… Three years turned to four and five—and still the seedling seemed to grow to nothing more than a stunted sapling, maybe three inches tall.
There was a reason it failed to thrive… There was that 60 foot poplar, with roots saturating the ground, right next to that 35 year old willow, with their own sprouts shooting up all around. Those two trees had enornmous gnarly roots that seemed to network and intertwine across our entire back yard. If you dug down, anywhere near that tree, you would hit roots...
The overhang fo those two majestic created welcome shade for us, but their combined canopy blanked out the needed sunshine for the spruce sapling. Those mature trees soaked up mst of the sunshine, and sucked up all the goodness from the soil where that little spruce was planted.
Now our property line was next to a small parkette.
Our home was surrounded by a windbreak of Blue Spruce, all down our fence line—15 trees, each one 40-50 feet tall… but one of those trees hadn’t taken, and it was taken out—leaving a large, sunny space about 12 feet across between the trees, just outside our fence…
I’m not sure who thought of it first—whether it was my son (who had been given the seedling) or me. One day, six years in, we just decided that the little plantlet would never grow where we had placed it. So, we dug around and uprooted that six-year old (three-inch!) sapling, tunneled out a hole in the 12-foot space between those enormous Spruce just outside our fence, and replanted the pathetic twig of a tree there. We gave it some help—we mixed the local earth with potting soil for shrubs, and then surrounded the sapling with a bricked in border. We put a bamboo rod by the bricks so that the city worker cutting the grass wouldn’t run it over, and the we waited to see whether good soil, and lots of light might grant that sapling a shot at life.
We watered it every day.
We fertilized it just outside our fenced yard, just like we did when it was within.
Hey, we even still prayed for that little tree.
We did the transplanting in early June of year six…
Within two months, it grew to a foot and a bit!
Summer turned to fall and winter. My son, on a lark, decided to adorn the little tree with Christmas lights and left-over ornaments from our December decorating, just for fun—and the most amazing thing happened:
Children from three different daycares in the neighborhood all gathered round that little Spruce, at different times of the day. They adopted it like Charlie Brown’s pathetic tree, and, just like in the cartoon, they sang Hark the Herald, holding hands. They did a little circle dance as we looked out and saw their joy.
Unbeknownst to us, they had watched it grow, were amazed, and they did a daily trip that December to sing around the tree. A city worker thanked us and commented on how that little tree made their Christmas special! So did several neighbors!
It grew another foot the next year—and did the same the year after that…
And then we moved away…
Five years later, when friends from that town called us up, we chatted about that tree and laughed together about the dancing children round the “Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree.”
Two hours later our friends visited the spot, took a picture, and sent it to us. It is now “rooted and established”, a thriving 8-foot tree, nestled in a sunny spot, nestled between two other mature Spruce, which both tower to 50 feet.
The name of the town where this all happened, is, you guessed it, Spruce Grove! It is fitting, as the town is a situated in a grove of Spruce trees…
The soil and the situation had to be corrected.
It couldn’t thrive among the overgrown, and thickly intertwined roots of the poplar and the willow.
It needed to be alongside its own.
What’s true of a stunted sapling is true of us…
God wants us to grow—and he does that by transplanting our existence from one kind of life into another. We move from darkness to light, and then we grow! Then he commends us as we find ourselves putting our roots into the soil of Christ Himself, and being established there.
If you haven’t grown where you are, it doesn’t mean that you have failed. It may mean that you need to be in a new place, in better soil, a place in which you “fit.” You are far better off to admit this—and get your roots to the soil that will help you grow!
The gospel teaches us to push down and expand our roots into the soil of knowing Christ Himself, and drawing our very life from Him. Paul says it well in a little book called Colossians…
“So, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, walk in him, rooted in Him, and built upon Him, and established in the faith as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving…”
Colossians 2:6-7 NAB.
©David Chotka, June 26, 2020
Spirit-Equip Ministries
