How to Be Inspired by a Single Tree’s Growth

There was a Tulip Poplar tree in my backyard that I pretty much ignored for two years. But growth happened anyway.

I didn’t plant it intentionally. It showed up in the corner of the yard the way most plants do. Uninvited, unplanned, easy to overlook. At first, the small sprout didn’t bother me. Just a minor inconvenience. I kept meaning to deal with it and never did. Too many other things on the list. Too many other places to put my attention.

Then one spring I looked up and it was taller than my fence.

I have no idea when that happened. Certainly not by anything I’d done. I hadn’t tended it, watered it, or given it a single moment of deliberate attention. I just looked away for what felt like a season and it became something I couldn’t ignore anymore.

For a long moment, I stood there looking at it, a little embarrassed that I’d spent so long not noticing. Then, something about it made me smile. Because that tree had absolutely no idea it was growing. It wasn’t monitoring its own progress or comparing itself to the oak nine feet away. It was just doing what a tree planted near good soil and adequate water does.

Grow. Quietly, consistently, without ceremony.

The Pressure We Put on Ourselves to Track Our Growth

We are not very good at being trees.

We want to measure our growth, document it, feel it happening in real time. Our spiritual journals are filled with thoughts and hopes of catching ourselves becoming wiser. After reading the same passage for the tenth time, we’re vaguely disappointed that it doesn’t hit differently yet. And the worst one? We compare our visible progress to someone else’s and quietly wonder if something is wrong with us.

Yet, underneath all of that measuring is a subtle, exhausting belief that if we can’t see it, it must not be happening.

But Psalm 1 never tells the tree to monitor itself. It just tells us where the tree is planted. Near the water. In good soil. In a place where the roots can drink.

The growth is assumed. It’s the natural result of being in the right place. The tree’s job isn’t to grow. It’s to stay planted.

Faithfulness Is the Work

We all have them. Those seasons when growth feels invisible. And it’s in those seasons when faithfulness is the growth. It’s not about the feeling of progress or the evidence of fruit. Just the daily, unspectacular and faithful routine of returning to the source.

The person in Psalm 1 meditates on the Word day and night because that’s where the roots drink. The consistency itself is the act of faith. The returning is the growth, even when nothing visible has changed yet.

Galatians 6:9 puts it quite gently: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

At the proper time. Not our time. Not the time we would have scheduled. But the time which the gardener knows and we don’t.

The invitation isn’t to try harder or track better. It’s to not give up. To stay planted. To keep returning to the water even on the days when nothing seems to be happening.

Especially on those days.

This month, our theme is GROW — Get Rooted On the Word. And maybe the most freeing thing about that theme is that your job has never been to manufacture the growth. It’s to just stay rooted. The rest has always been His.

Join the Conversation

If you could go back and tell your younger self one thing about growth and patience, what would it be?

Keep it as simple or as specific as you’d like. Sometimes the best wisdom fits in one sentence. Leave it in the comments and let’s encourage each other as we head into the rest of the week.

For the more personal reflection of what this month’s GROW theme stirred up in you, what you’re carrying into next month, or even what you’re still waiting on, head over to your journal and write it down. Even the unfinished parts. Our thoughts aren’t always complete when we first ponder them.