I recently read a book entitled The Secret Life of Trees. The most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. Trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.
The author writes that trees help each other through fungi. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods.
The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests.
Part of Job’s reply to Zophar included an astonishing metaphor for life. Job said, “For there is hope of a tree, If it be cut down, that it will sprout again, And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, And the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, And bring forth boughs like a plant” (Job 14:7–9).
Beneath the surface the roots of a tree are reaching out for a life source. The beauty of a large trunk, spanning branches, and gorgeous green leaves might be destroyed, but hidden in the earth are roots trying to bring life again.
To Job it seemed as if his life was just a tree stump. Death, loss, and disease had wreaked havoc upon his life. You might be thinking the same thing. Life and bad decisions have left nothing but a tree stump. Underneath the surface of the stump, however, is a system reaching for water. If you’ll stay connected to the Body of Christ. If you’ll keep reaching towards where life is, then you will sprout again! You may have fallen, but you can get back up again (Micah 7:8). All you need is scent of water, just a sniff of life to bud again!
Beloved, if there is hope for a tree, then there is hope for you and me.