Green in the Ashes

My daughter, Leah, and I drove over into Brantley County on Saturday to pick up the church mail. On the way back, I noticed something through the trees.

Green! Already?

Before I go further, I want to say that real families lost homes and property in this fire. That is not lost on us. We are praying for them.

Palmettos already pushing out fresh fronds through the ash, Brantley County, Georgia.

Not much green. Just scattered patches pushing up through the ash. The pines are scorched black. The underbrush is gone. The ground is gray, and in some places the ash was still smoking. Everything above the surface got taken.

But there in the middle of it, the palmettos were already putting out fresh fronds. Bright green against all that char, like nothing happened.

Psalm 92:12 came to my mind immediately:

I lived near Las Vegas, New Mexico for a few years in my early twenties. I saw my share of forest fires out there. The pines burn fast. But I had never seen anything like the palmettos before.

Here along the coast I have seen palm trees take hurricane-force winds. They bend hard and come back up. But what I was looking at was something else. Fire does not bend things. It takes them.

What survives a fire is what the fire could not reach. The palmetto's root system runs deep and wide. Fire moves fast across the surface. The roots hold, protected underground, and when the smoke clears, the plant just grows. That is the picture Scripture gives of the man whose life is planted in Christ. The storms come. The fires burn through. What is shallow gets taken. What is rooted holds.

The psalm does not say the righteous man avoids the hard seasons. It says he flourishes. Planted. Not floating, not surviving on the surface. Planted. And what is planted in the right soil does not get burned away; it just keeps growing.

There is a fire coming that will make a Brantley County wildfire look small. Scripture calls it the judgment of God, and every soul will stand in it. On that day, what is shallow will be taken. What has no root will be consumed. The palmetto does not decide the morning of the fire to grow deep roots. The roots are already there, or they are not.

Indeed, as the Psalmist wrote, the righteous will flourish like the palm tree. But that promise belongs to the righteous, to the man planted in the house of Yahweh. If you are not in Christ today, you have no root. Not a shallow one. None. The gospel is that Christ receives sinners. He does not ask you to grow your own roots first. Come to Him, and He will see to it that you hold.