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Have you ever heard the phrase, “bloom where you're planted”? It is a sweet sentiment, isn't it? It is everywhere you look these days, from adorable t-shirts to coffee mugs, vinyl decals on the windows of minivans, cute graphics on social media...you name it. If you haven't seen it yet, I guarantee you will see it on something the next time you make a Target or coffee run. The phrase is usually accompanied by some cute line art wildflowers, and it's really just a sweet little reminder that we should find ways to thrive no matter where we are and what season of life we are in. But...is it only a sweet reminder, or do these roots go much deeper than a cute and popular trend?
I am a little bit of a crazy plant lady. If my hubby and kids want to buy me a gift and they can't think of something, the fallback is always a plant. Who wants candles? Not this mom! PLANTS. A few years ago as we were selling our house to move to Florida I really wanted a plant called a pinstripe calathea and was having a lot of trouble finding one. My family hunted stores that were local to us at the time with no luck. About four weeks before we accepted an offer on our house, I found one! It wasn't large, but looked healthy and was one of only two or three on display, so I snapped it up! My husband just looked at me blankly as if he wanted to ask me why I was so crazy as to add yet one more thing for us to move, but he just blinked hard and didn't say a word. He knew by the look on my face that this plant was important to me. The plant did well for about eight weeks or so, surviving the 1,000-mile move quite well. But then I began to notice a decline and I wasn't quite sure what was causing it. Initially, I assumed that it was travel shock. It had undergone quite a journey, so I continued to give it TLC and waited for it to acclimate. When we had been in our new climate for a few months and it was still declining, I decided to investigate its roots. We had been in the throes of moving and settling in for so long, that it only just then occurred to me that it might have the dreaded death plug. What is a death plug, you may be asking? I'd love to tell you. Nurseries will often put very small plant pieces called propagations into a small tube of fabric mesh filled with peat that retains moisture and helps that piece to grow roots. It supports the plant in its early days of putting out roots and can help the plant to grow quickly. It can be useful, for sure, but it can also be very detrimental. See, this mesh is supposed to be something that the plant can just grow through, bursting out of its constraints as it gets larger and stronger. Unfortunately, this doesn't usually end up working as intended, and the mesh plug that was supposed to help ends up becoming a death sentence. When I took my calathea out of the soil, I was at first pleased to find that the roots were strong and didn't seem to be rotting at all, which was my first concern. If a plant isn't doing well when you're giving it all the right things, that's the go-to problem: root rot. But no, these roots were white and firm, and I didn't see a death plug. As I poked and prodded more, I realized that I was finding bits of mesh deep within the root system. Soon, I found that there was indeed a death plug. The roots had found their way out, but the bits and pieces were almost impossible to remove, and they were trapping moisture and bacteria at the very core of the plant, bringing rot. I picked and plucked out every little bit that I could and put the plant back into fresh soil, hoping for the best. It perked up a bit for a while, for sure, but then it began to decline again, this time in a really big way. It was time to really dig in and figure out if I could save this plant that I had wanted for so long. I took the sad plant out of the dirt and began washing all of the soil away from the roots to get a better look at them. When the soil was washed away, I began to find more pieces of that pesky death plug that I had tried to eradicate months before. It was twisted and choking so many of the roots, and a part of the plant at the very center had already been choked to death as a result. No matter what I did, I could not pick some of the pieces free. As much as I tried to avoid it, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to separate the plant.
If you aren't a crazy plant lady like I am, you might be confused as to why I was hesitant to do this. Separating plants sometimes means simply pulling gently to separate the intertwining root systems of individual plants, but it can also mean cutting the plants apart with a sharp knife. This does not come without risks. As you can imagine, creating a wound on the plant can allow bacteria to invade, much like in the case of our own bodies. It could help the plant to improve, or it could kill it. Taking a deep and dramatic breath, I separated what appeared to be the main section of the plant from a smaller section in one swift slice. In that motion, one plant became two. Would they survive? That question was unsure, but what was certain was that the cutting and wounding of one plant enabled me to remove the remainder of the mesh that had been so harmful to it, limiting its growth, and suffocating it to a slow death. When all of the offending matter had been removed, I carefully sprayed the two sets of roots with hydrogen peroxide to remove any bacteria that might remain and allowed the new wounds to callous over for a few hours. It is always nerve-wracking for me to leave roots to open air. It's like I think that they will dry and wither up much faster than is true. When the cut areas had calloused over enough, I potted the bigger, better-looking plant into fresh soil and hoped for the best. "Bigger and better looking" was still pitiful. It had two leaves. Two. The smaller one only had a single leaf. When I say that this plant was on death's door, believe me, it was absolutely knocking. Wiping its feet on the welcome mat of the grave. The smaller plant didn't give me any real inclination that it would survive very long, so I decided to try something different and grow it hydroponically in water. Calatheas are plants that can do quite well in that environment, so it was worth a shot. Making sure that I had every inch of dirt possible off of the remaining roots, I filled a container with filtered water and placed the plant inside. Both plants were set on a windowsill and promptly ignored for a week. Like most plant people, I tend to check my plants every ten minutes to see if they are doing something new, or if they are going to survive. This time, I set them on the windowsill and pulled the curtain to cover them up. As much as I wanted to part that curtain, I somehow found myself restraining. It was hard, but I managed to hold myself to it! Mostly. When I'd left them alone as long as I dared, I took them back to the kitchen for watering. For long weeks, nothing seemed to happen, but I continued to water them and make sure that nothing was going visibly amiss. One of the leaves on the larger plant dried up, and I just knew that the entire plant was going to die along with it. But before long, something new was beginning to disturb the dirt. A baby leaf started to push up beside that lone, bedraggled one! Soon, the plant in the water also grew a new leaf. I was nervously beginning to take hope that these plants that I had longed for and searched for might survive. In this interim, we went to a local garden show. There were many incredible plants available for purchase, and if I had allowed myself, I could have spent thousands of dollars on absolutely beautiful plants. This included some impressive specimens of the pinstripe calathea that I was striving to keep alive at home. My husband asked if I wanted to just buy one of the large ones and toss the sad ones I had at home. Boy was that ever tempting! The calatheas at the garden show were the picture of health, and they were huge! Local growers were doing a much better job at growing plants that were propagated more responsibly than the ones you could purchase at a big box store. I reluctantly shook my head and said no, I would keep fighting for my little plants. I just couldn't give up on them yet. Many months have passed, and I can proudly say that my plants are still doing well. In just a few months, two leaves have turned to eight, and one leaf has turned to three! Calatheas aren't the fastest growers, and that can be very frustrating, but I have to remind myself that many things are happening that I can't see with my eyes right now.
In many ways, this can reflect our lives. So often in life, we see a decline, so we remove ourselves from a bad situation and clean ourselves up. But we don't always get all of those toxic bits out, and they continue to fester below the surface. Only when we are willing to truly cut things away and allow our Master Gardener to separate us from something that we still love can all of that toxic mess be removed and cleaned up. The things that we love might not be inherently toxic themselves, but the toxic stuff is often lurking in the roots that are woven together, suffocating us and keeping us from growing, no matter how much effort goes into our survival. See, these plants actually had great root systems, but all of their energy was going toward the survival of the roots, and there was not enough left over to make the plant produce leaves. They were working far too hard to simply remain and could not thrive. Once I had done the dirty work and replanted them, it was going to take a while before I saw growth. Why, you ask? The plants had to reestablish themselves, rest, and grow strong and stable root systems before they could expend the energy to push out new leaves. During this season of waiting for my pathetic plants to recover, our women's group at church talked a lot about this season of life, using the term “roots before fruits”. So many times we get frustrated waiting for growth and flowers or fruit, but what we can't see is that the plant is doing the hardest work first: establishing strong roots so the plant can not just survive, but thrive. Don't get discouraged when you see this in your own life, friend. Your life, just like my plants, might seem as if everything is dying. Sometimes removing the things that are killing you is horribly painful, but it has to be done. It might look like nothing is wrong on the surface, but your leaves are droopy and falling off for no reason. Your roots might even look good, but something that has lurked for many, many years may only just now start to create a problem. Isn't that like the enemy of our soul? He loves to plant things in us early on that don't seem to be an issue. They might actually look like support. Letting God take those toxic death plugs out of our lives sets us up for seasons of growth, and then seasons of thriving! Don't be tempted in the meantime to throw in the towel because something looks bigger and better, but commit to reaching that point for yourself, rather than claiming success that wasn't yours in the first place. Your roots will thank you, and soon you will have the beautiful foliage and fruit in your life that are the results of a strong root system. Be committed to doing the dirty work of digging out things that will infect your spiritual life and bring destruction to every aspect of yourself. When they are removed and healing begins, your season of rest also begins. Rest is where real growth soon becomes evident!
So, do you see an area of your life that you might need to dig up and let the Lord pluck out some detrimental things from? It is ok to feel reluctant and nervous. It is painful, that is to be sure. Often, we have to say goodbye to things that we love and cherish. We might have to face painful memories that we have yet to address, and instead have stuffed down deep inside, suffocating our roots. Once you have done the yucky part of getting rid of whatever is limiting your life (and root rot smells terrible), don't be discouraged by the lack of visible growth. You might sit for months and wonder, “Jesus said that you will know a person by their fruits, but I don't even have fruit! What's wrong with me? Am I actually the problem?!” How do I know that you might wonder that? Because that was my constant worry. I was terrified that I had been an awful person and that I just wasn't bearing any fruit at all because I was failing God somehow. Again, that was the enemy! If he can't stop you from letting the Lord have His way in your life, then he will try to taint your view of yourself. He will fling mud against the window of your life, obscuring the view. But the Lord will bring a powerful rainstorm to wash that window and to water your roots, bringing visible growth above the surface again. Trust that He will do that in your life.
Let's revisit the quote from the beginning of this article: "Bloom where you are planted." To do this can be a wonderful thing. It can mean to flower in adversity. But it can also be a statement that holds you back. We have to be both willing to flourish where the Lord puts us, and also to be willing to let Him remove us from places where we have been planted that might be for the past. New seasons of life often mean painful separations. What is the Lord separating you from? What is He cleansing from you that may have supported you at first, only to limit and infect you as you outgrew it? It is so vital to let Him clean us up from time to time so that we can indeed bloom where we are planted! If this is your season of struggle, know that He is faithful to prune your roots and cut away anything that does not produce good fruit in your life. Our Father is a gardener who loves to see us bear fruit, so He is going to do everything He can to see us thrive. Your season of beautiful fruiting is coming! Don't run from His tending, but let Him do what every gardener must do to bring a beautiful season to fruition. I promise that there will be beautiful days of health and flourishing in your future! Just hang on and let Him cut away the things that would hold you back.
“Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit. So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.“ Galatians 6:8-9
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