Am I rooted in Christ?

What Does It Mean to Be Rooted in Christ?

There are seasons of motherhood when you can feel like you are being pulled in a hundred different directions. As though you might just burst if one more thing lands on your list of responsibilities.

Your children need you. Your marriage needs attention. Your work needs to get done. The house needs cleaning. Someone needs a snack. Someone else needs help with homework. Not to mention the 64 oz of water, nutritional value of each meal, walking at least 8,000 steps, getting 7-9 hours of sleep, meeting of with friends for a social refuel, and… and… and… And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you are trying to remember who you are.

It is easy to feel unsteady, unsettled, maybe even a little unsafe.

And when you are already overwhelmed, one difficult moment can feel like confirmation that something is wrong with you.

You lost your temper.

You felt resentful.

You wanted to be alone.

You struggled to respond with patience.

You prayed, but you still felt angry.

You knew what you should do, but you didn't do it.

After the past few weeks, we've talked about what happens when emotions become overwhelming, how mom guilt can turn into shame, and how conviction can be very different from condemnation.

But there is another question underneath all of it:

What are you rooted in?

A tree doesn't become strong by having perfect branches.

A tree's stability comes from what is happening beneath the surface.

The roots anchor it. They provide what it needs to grow. They allow it to remain standing when the weather changes.

I think there is something important here for us as Christian women.

We can spend so much energy trying to fix what everyone can see—the anger, the anxiety, the parenting struggles, the communication, the exhaustion—that we forget to pay attention to what is underneath it all.

Where am I finding my security?

What am I believing about myself?

What happens to my sense of worth when I make a mistake?

Where do I turn when I am overwhelmed?

Am I rooted in the approval of others? My ability to keep everything together? My performance as a mother? My ability to be a “good Christian”?

Or am I rooted in Christ?

Being rooted in Christ doesn't mean you never struggle. It doesn't mean you never get angry, anxious, overwhelmed, disappointed, or discouraged. It means those things don't have to become the foundation of your identity. You can have a hard day and still be God's daughter. You can make a mistake and still be worthy of love. You can need to apologize without believing you are a failure. You can experience strong emotions without assuming they mean your faith is weak.

You can be honest about what is happening inside of you and still stand firmly in who you are in Christ.

Roots grow quietly.

One of the things I love about the picture of a tree is that so much of its growth happens where we can't see it.

The roots aren't generally impressive. Sometimes, they aren’t even noticable or notable…

They aren't polished. They aren't performative. They are simply doing the work of anchoring the tree.

Maybe your spiritual life can look like that too. Maybe being rooted isn't about doing more. Maybe it is learning to return to your creator over and over again.

Returning to truth… to prayer… to scripture… to honesty… to the presence of God… to the reminder that your worth was never dependent on how perfectly you handled today.

You don't have to become a different woman before you can come to God.

You can come as you are—and allow Him to meet you there.

That is where growth begins.

And perhaps that is what it means to be rooted in worth and growing in wellness: not becoming someone who never struggles, but becoming someone who knows where to return when she does.