Do Not Sever Your Roots

“She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” Proverbs 3:18

Dearest Daughters,

Lots of people talk about agricultural sustainability, but very few are talking about sustainable relationships, sustainable marriages, and sustainable generations. And that is the most important sustainability of all.

I was recently in a meeting where I heard a man say that he personally knew twenty-four people whose adult children had “canceled” them. Until the last few years, I’d never even heard that term used this way, and I find it deeply grievous. It is the sign of a failing culture. If there’s no sustainability in relationships, if there’s no continuity between generations, then we have lost life itself.

So what does it take to create that kind of durability?

First, I believe it’s a question of identity.

Second, it’s a recognition of our place in eternity and in history.

We were never meant to be the whole picture. We were meant to be connected. We’re connected to the roots, the trunk, and to the preceding branches. If we sever this connection, how can there be fruit? Only God is all in all, and each generation is one step closer to the harvest He desires.

Let me begin with identity.

I’ve often heard people ask, “Was it hard for you to give up your career, your dreams, or your previous life to become a mother?”

For me, no. Once I understood motherhood to be my calling, I couldn’t imagine anything more important in the world. Motherhood was not a detour from the future. It was the future.

This was how the kingdom of God would continue coming again and again upon the earth, generation after generation.

To stand in the place of motherhood was, to me, to take hold of a story stretching from the faith of Abraham, through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed, to the returning of the Lord and the question of whether He would still find faith upon the earth.

We know the kingdoms of self-centeredness, broken families, dissolved relationships, and fragmentation are flourishing. I wanted to see the kingdom of heaven flourish also—the kingdom of love, faithfulness, sacrifice, and thriving life. Motherhood was my opportunity to participate in that work.

So if motherhood is your calling, don’t view it as an isolated or temporary identity. View it as part of the future itself. The future of whether there will still be a people of faith upon the earth when your grandchildren are born . . . and when your great-grandchildren are born.

We must think long-term.

We’ve been trained by a culture of “click here,” “swipe there” to think in short-term, immediate, narrow fragments. But you must learn to think generationally.

Look back into the past:

Why did my ancestors come to this country?

What were they longing for?

What sacrifices did they make?

Then look forward:

What will I leave behind for my grandchildren’s children?

What kind of inheritance—spiritual, relational, and cultural—will remain after I’m gone?

If you think this way, your parenting will be grounded in vision rather than reaction, and your family will have roots deep enough to endure storms.

And this brings me to generations. No generation in and of itself, and certainly no individual—is meant to be all in all. That’s who Christ is. He alone fills all in all. He was before time began, and He will remain after time ends.

I think of history like a tree planted from a seed. The roots go deep into the earth, carrying out their hidden work. Without them, the tree would die. Yet we don’t look at the roots expecting fruit. Neither do we find fruit in the trunk, or even in the earliest branches.

So it’s futile to look back at your parents or grandparents and complain that they didn’t bear the fruit that perhaps your generation was meant to bear. When we compare one generation to another in this way, we misunderstand what God is doing across history.

Every time we sever ourselves from the generation before us, we cut ourselves off from the roots. And when branches lose connection to the roots, the leaves begin to wither.

I believe much of this rejection of previous generations comes from a loss of vision and identity. People no longer understand that humanity itself was meant to be on a journey back toward God, back toward the wholeness we lost in the Garden when mankind chose autonomy over surrender.

Every act of severing becomes, in some way, a participation in fragmentation, death, and entropy, another bite from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, deciding for ourselves rather than surrendering to the Tree of Life.

And yet it is those ancient roots, however tangled, scarred, or gnarled they may appear, that still nourish us. It is that old trunk, no matter how imperfect, gnarled or weathered, that still supports us.

May God help us to give thanks for the generations that came before us. No matter their failures, we would not exist without them.

That honor for one’s roots is something I always admired about my father.

His own father was a deeply broken man who tragically eventually ended his own life, and yet my father still spoke of him with kindness and honor. I never heard him speak with bitterness, though he certainly did not condone the things he had done.

My father believed that his father had given him life. He had ridden the rails and eventually settled in Texas, where my father would one day encounter God. And to my father, that was enough reason to give thanks and honor his memory.

Do not sever yourself from the roots, my daughters, or you may one day find your own branches barren.

“When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)

With all my love,

Mom