Growing and Thriving With Your Spiritual Roots

Greetings, greetings, greetings, Welcome to the road. less traveled the more of God. I am your co-host, Regina D Jemisin. I am here with my brother, my friend, my co-host, as always, Doug P Smith.

Say hello to the people sir, Hey family, what's going on?

We are glad you decided to tune in. We are here today to talk about growth, growth, growth. What does it look like? How do you measure it? If we are growing, as believers, we should actually see some results about this. And so we're just here to have a conversation about growth, growth, growth. And I just wanna start to paint this picture for you. If you see, particularly for our season now, we are in the spring, or been on when you're listening to this spring summer season here where we are, and we experienced four seasons in our universe. So it's spring, summer, winter, fall, and spring tends to be a mild and kind of rainy season. Summer is lots of sunshine, warm weather, and so in this season you see a lot of greenery and growth, right. But if you look at the forest at a certain time of year, particularly in the winter, all the trees are bare, and if you look at them because they're bare, you really cannot tell if they're alive or dead, because they all look bare, right. And I wanna suggest to you that how you would know a tree in that situation is alive or dead is you would be able to see by their roots if they're alive or dead. And in this conversation about growth. Today we wanna really point to where are your roots planted, where are your roots planted in your life? Because that is what shows your growth, tells your growth, and then we're gonna I'm not sure then we're gonna have an additional episode I just decided that Doug didn't know that but we're gonna have a second episode about growth. So we really wanna focus on this. Well, where are your roots? Where are your roots and how might that look for you in your life? What you got, doug?

Would it be helpful if I took myself off mute. So, talking about growth, i have a confession to make. My confession is that I do not have a green thumb. If you want a plant to die, you can send them to me, and not for lack of try to keep the plant growing or living and growing, but I just, for whatever reason, can't figure out how to keep a plant alive, and not just alive but growing. So what is my point? My point here is one of the challenges I think that we have in talking about growing is one there are times when we don't know the season that we're in. One thing that I have come to know about plants from just talking to folks who do have that green thumb is that they tend to know what season a plant is in and whether they need more light or less light, more water or less water, whether they need fertilizer this or that or whatever the case may be. So, from a human perspective, we need to first know what we need to grow. To live and to grow. I should say Those are two different things, because we can just live along and be alive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're growing. In my own health journey. What I've found out is that you need a certain amount of protein to feed to your muscles. If you don't have the right amount of protein to feed your muscles, then your body will start to feed on itself. While it looks like you are losing weight, what really was happening is that your body is eating itself. It's eating the muscle. So, similarly, when we talk about growing, getting bigger and increasing our relationship with God, increasing our faith, if we don't feed ourselves the right food, it can look from the outside like we are doing just fine, but on the inside, what is actually happening is that we are eating ourselves and we are losing weight. We are losing our relationship, our strength, our close connectedness with God. That could come in a lot of different ways. Maybe it was when you first found your faith, in your relationship with God. You used to be up at five o'clock every day just to read the word or to read about God, or just to talk with God, or to journal or whatever it was that you did. But now, all of a sudden, a few years later, or 20 or 30 years, however many years When the alarm goes off if it goes off, you just turn over and go back to sleep, you just say well, i could just listen to so-and-so on the radio. Today I'm not going to spend any time. You used to go to church or you used to attend your faith community, and you used to be the first one there. Now you're the last one there, If you come at all. You used to be able to speak into people's lives and now it's just a hollow thing for you. Yes, baby, i will pray for you, but you go away and you don't pray in that instance. My first thought here is that we have to know the type of food that we need to ingest in order to grow.

Got it. If we're talking about the type of food, then that is what would feed your roots, like what you're connected to. That would help you stay grounded and connected to God. Because I started out with the question is where are your roots? Where are your roots and what are you connected to? What is your source of nutrition, which I see is where you're pointing because it's like okay, well, what are you ingested? What are you taking in in your life? What are you staying close to a faith community? Are you staying close to people who pull you to be greater? Are you increasing your prayer time every day? What are the habits or the things that you're doing that keep you connected to your source of life and power? Because that's what's going to have you grow. Because, look, healthy things grow. If you're healthy, if you're healthy in your body, if you're healthy in your mind, if you're healthy in your spirit, then you grow. Things with the proper nutrients grow, things that are connected to the proper source of life grow And it'll show up. It won't be like how can one vendor is growing? No, it's like, yeah, it does grow. You can see. You can see It's like I mean, for those who have ever raised kids. You know when your kids grow it's obvious, you see it, you feel it, you hear it. You can hear the changes in their conversation. You see the changes in their bodies. You know it's obvious. They're growing Why? Because they're connected to parents who love them, who keep them, who protect them. They connected to parents who are teaching them and raising them and giving them the lessons of life that they need to be able to make it on their own. So, yeah, i think that's important. I think that's really important And I think that's where we look to see what growth really looks like, what else.

We also And you know people don't like to grow, because growing means change And it's very challenging to change. You know, as a parent and this is tough for me to even talk about because it's happening to me right now My baby boy, the apple of my eye, is about to leave me and move away. And it's not like he was going off to college That I dealt with pretty good, but he's moving away kind of almost in a permanency. He's going off to his next season in life And that's an opportunity for him. That is undeniable, but it's a change. It will be a change for me. I won't get to see him all the time, i won't get to lay my hands on him, i won't talk to him as much as I do right now, and it's challenging for me And I can only imagine, even though he's probably not thinking along the lines of things that are about to change for me. It will be a change for him that he may be looking forward to or maybe not. I don't want to speak for him, but change, growth means change, change means challenge, and so the things that we used to do, that we're accustomed to, that are normal for us, that we've become a habit whatever that thing is that allowed us to get to a certain level of growth. Once we get to that level, those things might possibly and probably will change, because what got you to point B may not get you to point C, and that's a hard pill to swallow. Well, i was in the gym and I was doing 10 reps of 100 push-ups. At first I was gaining all these muscles, but now it doesn't seem like it's doing anything for me. What's wrong? Your body has gotten used to what took you from zero to B, and now your body is saying I need something else to get me from B to C. God will challenge us in some different ways and we have to be ready for that change. We might be praying God, give me a change. I want to change. But if we're going to pray that prayer because some of us will pray that Lord, just change my situation. I'm ready for a change. I've been your faithful servant, i've done what you and I'm ready to make that transition or whatever the case may be, and we'll pray those kind of prayers so that our situation will change. And then, when it changes, we're not ready for the other part of it, which is what we do when we arrive in that change has to change as well, and it's a challenge for us because people, by and large, don't like to change.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So I think that that even might be a place for us to end in, because there's a couple other points. I think that would take us in a different direction, about growth, about grace Yeah, that's probably another conversation about growth.

That will be our next episode. You just give us like two more episodes.

Right, that will be our next episode. But, you know, consider where you are, consider where you are in your life and what you are considering, what you are dealing with, what brings you joy at this point in your life, and consider are you being nourished, are you connected to the things that are in, that are that are that assist your growth, that support your growth? Are you grabbing, reaching towards the things that support your growth? Are you, you know, are you building muscle Or not? right? And so just stay tuned and we're going to continue this conversation about growth and healthy things, growing. You know and you as a whole person with amazing dreams and priorities what it looks like for you to continue to grow in your life. And so consider this week where are your roots, what are you connected to that is really nourishing you in the way that that is important and that spurs on your growth, and continue, stay tuned with us next episode so that we can continue this conversation about growing, and we really want to talk about growing being the nature of life and and what it looks like when we're growing through changes. So stay tuned and and Doug is going to pray us out of here Thank you for being with us today.

Let's go to the throne. Well, thank you for this opportunity to once again talk about your nature and what your will is for us in your life. Your word declares that you would give us our daily bread, father, and we sincerely hope that part of the bread that you are giving to all of us is, in part, what we have delivered in this episode or these episodes. God Father, we thank you for your, your grace and your mercy and your kindness and your love. Please protect each and every one of us and those who are listening and in the more God family. Let it be edifying to the body, to the mind, to the soul. Father, let something that has been shared, talked about, laughed about, be a seed and a sprout. Father, to to further our walk on the road less traveled. Now, father, as we depart from this place, but not from your presence, be less. All of us to come back at the appointed time is our prayer, in your name, amen.