January: Created to Add Value
Day 11 — 11 January
Roots
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, and whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.” — Jeremiah 17:7–8 (NKJV)
The deepest part of a tree is the part you never see, and this single fact contains more wisdom about the nature of a fruitful life than most people absorb in a lifetime of trying to produce visible results. We admire the canopy, we enjoy the shade, we pick the fruit and praise its sweetness, and we photograph the blossoms in spring because they are beautiful enough to stop us in our tracks, but none of these things, not one of them, would exist if it were not for a vast, hidden, tangled network of roots buried in the darkness beneath the soil, drawing water from sources the branches know nothing about and anchoring the trunk against winds the leaves have not yet felt. Everything you see above the ground is sustained by something you cannot see below it, and the health of what is hidden determines the strength of what is visible, without exception, in every season, for the entire life of the tree.
Jeremiah understood this, and when God gave him a picture to describe the kind of person who trusts in the Lord, He did not choose the image of a warrior, a king, a builder, or any other figure whose strength is displayed in public. He chose a tree, and not just any tree but a tree whose defining characteristic is the location and behaviour of its roots. The Hebrew word at the centre of this image is shorashim (שָׁרָשִׁים, meaning “roots”), the plural of shoresh (שֹׁרֶשׁ, meaning “root,” “foundation,” or “source”), and Jeremiah used it to describe something that the person who trusts in God does that most people never think about, because it happens underground, out of sight, in the hidden interior of a life that the world judges entirely by what it can see on the surface.
The tree Jeremiah described is planted by the waters, and the Hebrew word for “planted” is shathul (שָׁתוּל, meaning “transplanted” or “firmly placed”), which carries the sense of deliberate positioning rather than accidental growth. This tree did not spring up randomly wherever a seed happened to fall; it was placed, intentionally and with forethought, beside a source of water, and its roots spread out toward the river with the slow, quiet, purposeful movement of a living thing that knows instinctively where its sustenance comes from. The word Jeremiah used for “spreads out” is shalach (שָׁלַח, meaning “to send out,” “to extend,” or “to reach toward”), and it describes an active, ongoing, directional movement, roots that are continuously reaching, continuously extending, continuously positioning themselves closer to the water that keeps the whole tree alive.
What the Heat Reveals
And then Jeremiah introduced the detail that turns this image from a pleasant pastoral scene into something far more searching and far more relevant to the way you will live the rest of this month, because he said, “and will not fear when heat comes.” The heat is not a hypothetical. Jeremiah did not say “if heat comes” but “when,” and the certainty of that word changes everything about the way this image should be read, because it means the tree is not being promised a life without heat. It is being promised a life that can endure it, and the difference between a life that collapses under pressure and a life that continues to produce fruit in the middle of it is not the presence or absence of suffering but the depth and direction of the roots.
Think about what heat actually does to a tree whose roots are shallow, because this is where Jeremiah’s metaphor becomes uncomfortably personal. A shallow-rooted tree looks perfectly healthy when conditions are favourable, and you could walk past it in spring and see the same green leaves, the same spreading branches, the same promising clusters of fruit as any other tree in the field. But when the heat comes, when the rain stops and the ground hardens and the air turns dry and punishing, the shallow-rooted tree has nowhere to draw from, because its roots never went deep enough to reach the water that lies beneath the surface of the soil. The tree that looked identical to its neighbours in the easy season is exposed as fundamentally different from them in the hard one, and the difference was always there, hidden underground, long before the heat arrived to reveal it.
Now, I want you to hold that picture in your mind and let it ask you a question that is worth sitting with for longer than is comfortable: where are your roots right now? Not where do you want them to be, and not where do you tell people they are, but where are they actually, in the honest, hidden, underground reality of your interior life? Because the heat is coming, not as a threat from God but as a fact of human existence in a world where drought and difficulty are as certain as the turning of the seasons, and the question that will determine whether you continue to bear fruit in that season or whether your leaves curl and your branches crack is not how strong your public life looks right now but how deep your private roots have gone.
Where Fruit Comes From
The final phrase of Jeremiah’s image is the one that ties this entry directly to the theme of the entire devotional, because after describing the roots, after acknowledging the heat, after promising that the tree will not fear and will not be anxious, Jeremiah added this: “nor will cease from yielding fruit.” The Hebrew word for “yielding” is asah (עָשָׂה, meaning “to make,” “to produce,” or “to bring forth”), and it is one of the most common verbs in the Old Testament, used hundreds of times to describe the act of producing or creating something tangible and real. The tree does not merely survive the drought; it continues to produce, to create, to bring forth something nourishing and sustaining for the people around it, even when the conditions above the ground would suggest that production should be impossible.
And this is the connection that I have been waiting eleven days to make, because everything we have explored since Day 1 about the nature of adding value, about being made in the image of a giving God, about being crafted as His poiēma, about being salt and light, about seeing people, about becoming present in their reality, about the power of your words, about the sacredness of ordinary work, about faithfulness in the unseen moments, all of it depends on something that nobody else can see and that no amount of external effort can manufacture. It depends on your roots.
You can learn every technique for adding value that this devotional will ever teach you, and you can practise them with discipline and sincerity for the next twelve months, but if your roots are shallow, if your interior life is not drawing from a source deeper than your own energy, your own willpower, and your own emotional reserves, then the first serious drought will expose the gap between what your life looks like on the surface and what it is actually built on underneath. And when the heat comes, the fruit will stop, not because you have stopped trying but because you have nothing left to draw from, and a tree that has exhausted its reserves cannot produce fruit by sheer determination any more than a well that has run dry can produce water by being shouted at.
But the tree that Jeremiah described, the one whose shorashim reach continually toward the river, the one that was deliberately shathul beside the water, the one whose roots are always in the process of shalach, always extending, always reaching, always positioning themselves closer to the source, that tree does not stop producing when the heat comes, because its supply is not dependent on the weather above the ground. Its supply comes from below, from a source that the drought cannot touch, and the fruit it bears in the hard season is the same quality as the fruit it bore in the easy one, because the roots have never stopped doing their quiet, invisible, underground work.
This is what it means to add value sustainably over the course of a lifetime rather than in short, exhausting bursts that leave you empty and wondering where the passion went. The people who add the most value to the world around them over the longest period of time are not the people with the most talent, the most energy, or the most impressive public presence. They are the people with the deepest roots, the people whose hidden, interior, underground life is so thoroughly connected to a source of sustenance that the conditions above the ground, favourable or hostile, abundant or barren, celebrated or forgotten, do not determine whether they continue to produce. They produce because they are connected, and they are connected because their roots went looking for water long before the drought arrived.
Where the River Is
Jeremiah told us exactly where the tree is planted: by the waters, beside the river. And the question for you on this eleventh morning is not whether you believe that the river exists, because most people who pick up a devotional already believe that God is real. The question is whether your roots are actually in the water or merely near it, because there is a difference between knowing where the river is and drawing from it, between believing in the source and being sustained by it, between having a theology of God’s sufficiency and having an interior life that actually drinks from what God provides.
The thought to carry into this day is one drawn from the soil rather than the sky, and it is this: the value you add to the world around you this year will only be as deep and as durable as the roots that sustain it, and the time to send those roots deeper is not when the heat arrives but now, in this quiet morning, in this ordinary moment, before the drought has a chance to reveal what you are actually built on.
Declaration
My roots reach deep today, extending beneath the surface of my visible life toward a source of sustenance that no drought can diminish and no season of difficulty can dry up. I am shathul, deliberately planted beside the living water, and my shorashim are always in motion, always reaching, always positioning themselves closer to the God whose supply has never once been interrupted. The heat does not frighten me, because what sustains me is not dependent on the conditions above the ground, and the fruit I bear in the hard season is nourished by the same river that feeds me in the easy one. I am not anxious about what this year holds, because my roots know where the water is, and the water has never failed, and the God who planted me beside it is the same God who watches over every inch of hidden growth with the same care He gives to the visible harvest. I am rooted, I am nourished, and I do not cease from yielding fruit.
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