You Are Not God: Experience the Freedom of Stopping

I wanna begin with an illustration, a true illustration.

It comes from South Central Utah in Fishlake National Forest, and there is a tree there that actually is so big it covers a hundred and six acres.

That's actually eighty American football fields.

It looks like a forest, actually, of forty-seven thousand different white-barked aspen trees.

Uh, and they actually have been alive, some scientists say, for eighty thousand years, this, this particular tree.

And it doesn't, it doesn't look like one tree.

It looks like forty-seven thousand different ones.

But it's actually the trunk is genetically connected to all the other trunks.

Uh, they have the same DNA, and they share a single root system.

They're a single organism.

That particular tree is called Pando, Latin for "I spread." It's the largest tree on Earth, according to some scientists, both by weight and by size, land area.

So individual stems, actually, which are trees, they die every hundred, hundred and fifty years.

But the root system doesn't care.

When the trunk falls over, the roots simply send new growth nearby.

Uh, and actually, after a wildfire sweeps through the area, it can burn through all the trees, but the root system re-remains intact, and it's not a long time before a whole new grove of trees emerges.

The organism's, what's called immortality, this Pando system, it may be eighty thousand years old, but it has nothing to do with one individual stem or one individual tree.

It...

And it's, it's interconnectedness.

It's, it's entirely from this network.

And so these roots share resources.

So if one tree is weak, it gets extra nutrients and waters from the others, and it helps the struggling trees.

So it's not that the aspen tree, like an oak tree, goes deep.

It's actually, it stays-- It's its connection that makes it so remarkable, this underground source of power.

So in the same way, here, at least at Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, uh, we've really made a move to, to build community, recognizing that part of the root system, of course, is spiritual practices like the daily office and Sabbath and rule of life, et cetera.

But there's a need for community acro-across-- to keep the organism, the roots connected and strong, to be able to make it through fires and difficulties and tr-- and, and trials and, and have a root system that's connected to others.