Interlocking
Roots

01The redwood should not be standing

Coast redwoods are the tallest living things on earth. Some pass three hundred feet, taller than a thirty-story building, and individual trees have stood for well over a thousand years through storm after storm.

Now the strange part. Their roots are shallow. Not deep in the way you would expect for something that tall, but roughly six to twelve feet down. There is no great central anchor driving into bedrock. By every intuition we have built over the last three sessions, a redwood is a tree that should come out of the ground in the first serious wind.

02The roots go out instead of down

What redwoods do is grow sideways. Their roots spread outward, sometimes a hundred feet or more, and then they reach into the root systems of the redwoods around them and interlock. In places the roots of neighboring trees actually fuse together.

The result is that a grove is not a collection of individual trees standing near each other. Structurally it behaves closer to one organism. When wind pushes on any single tree, that force does not stay with that tree. It travels through the joined roots and is absorbed by the whole grove.

Which is why redwoods are almost never found alone. A solitary redwood is a vulnerable redwood. The height that is glorious in a grove becomes a liability by itself.

03A correction to the last three sessions

We need to say something plainly, because three sessions of a certain kind of teaching can quietly produce a wrong conclusion.

We have talked about foundations dug down into rock. We have talked about a taproot reaching water in a drought. We have talked about pruning your own canopy. Every one of those is personal, private, and largely invisible to others. Somebody in this room has been hearing all of it as confirmation that spiritual maturity is a solo project, and that if they were just disciplined enough on their own, they would be fine.

The redwood says otherwise. Depth is necessary and depth is not sufficient. There is a category of force that no individual root system, however deep, is built to absorb alone. And in those seasons what holds you is not your own foundation. It is what your roots are attached to.

04Community is structural, not social

Ecclesiastes does not commend companionship because loneliness is unpleasant. It gives four load-bearing functions, and they are worth separating.

Someone lifts you when you fall. Not if. When. And the warning is precise: woe to the one who falls with nobody there. The falling is assumed. The isolation is the tragedy.

Someone keeps you warm. Presence in a cold season, when nothing is being fixed and nothing needs to be said.

Someone stands with you under attack. One can be overpowered. Two hold.

The third strand. Then the image shifts from two people to a cord of three, because two people alone are still just two people. The strength comes from being bound to something beyond the pair.

Now put Colossians beside it. Paul writes rooted and built up in him — and in the Greek, every one of those words is plural. He is not describing a private interior life. He is describing a group of people being rooted together into Christ. Almost every promise about maturity in the New Testament was written to a "you" that means all of you.

Here is the honest difficulty. This kind of community requires being known, and being known requires telling somebody something true and unflattering about yourself. That is the actual cost, and it is why most of us settle for proximity instead. Proximity is sitting near people every week. It holds nothing in a wind.

05What interlocking looks like this week

Not a new small group and not a personality overhaul. Root growth is lateral and slow, and it happens in ordinary increments.

Telling one person one true thing you have been carrying by yourself. Asking for concrete help instead of assuring everyone you are fine. Showing up to the same room repeatedly until the people there stop being strangers. Noticing who has gone quiet and going to them before they surface on their own.

And one more, which most of us skip: letting someone help you when you do not strictly need it yet. Roots have to be joined before the storm. They cannot be joined during it.