“Be careful that no one fails to receive God’s grace and begins to cause trouble among you. A person like that can ruin many of you.” – Hebrews 12:15
The King James states:
“Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.”
Jaclyn, Max, and I saw the results of this one Saturday. We went up to Knight’s Ferry to do a little ‘geo-caching’ or modern day treasure hunting.
Once we’d found our ‘treasure, we hiked a little further to a spot where we could see a tree positioned at the very top of a large rock jutting from the earth.
Besides the fact that the tree was growing from a rock and not from the ground, there was something else about this tree that was so unique I took a great many pictures of it.
Remember me mentioning that it was positioned at the top of a very large rock? I mean ROCK. That ROCK, however, was hewn in two. Split in half from the base of the tree to the ground beneath it.
One side held the tree with its roots appearing to be varicose veins creeping down what had once been the center, the core, of the rock.
The other half was a devastated pile of rubble. Great chunks of rock lay strewn in what appeared to be a blast pattern of the moment the pressure of the growing, extending roots finally grew too great for the rock to contain.
I took some pictures and as I clicked away, saw that verse on the page and wondered how often we might hide a deep root system of bitterness beneath the leaves, branches, boughs and trunk of a beautiful tree on the surface of our lives.
