🌳 DEEPLY ROOTED · Post 6- The Soil Series An exploration of what it looks like to grow from the ground up.

Deeply Rooted is a series built on a simple observation: trees don’t grow from the top down. They start in the soil, in the unseen, the underground, the slow work of roots finding their way. So do we. This series moves through five stages — Soil, Roots, Trunk, Branches, Canopy — from the story of where you’ve come from, through the deeper work of understanding what has shaped you, into the integration and flourishing that becomes possible when you know where you’re rooted.

New here? Start at the beginning → [link] Find all posts in the series → [link]

What Was I Given?

I grew up in evangelical Christianity. Faith was the air I breathed before I had words for it. And like a lot of people who grew up in that world, I also absorbed — without anyone saying it directly — a particular shape of what the Gospel meant. It meant this: that Jesus died for your sins, that if you believed you would have eternal life, and that everything else was downstream of that central transaction.

I didn’t argue with that. I still don’t, entirely. But somewhere along the way, living and working in communities where I watched systems grind people down, where I saw how disadvantage and advantage were not randomly distributed — something in me kept insisting that the Gospel had to be larger than what I’d been handed. Not different. Larger.

I didn’t experience that as a theological shift so much as an instinct. Serving the practical needs of people and communities always felt like an extension of faith to me, not a departure from it. And for a long time, no one pushed back. I led ministries where proclamation and presence happened together — where the word and the work weren’t separate things — in communities that had been left behind by most institutions, including the church. Nobody questioned it then. The people questioning me now were sometimes the people standing next to me then.

What changed was when I started naming race and systemic injustice — asking not just about individual suffering but about why certain communities bear so much of it. That’s when it got uncomfortable. And I’ve had to ask honestly — how big are we actually willing to let the Gospel be?

What Does the Text Say?

Recently, a financial supporter of my husband’s ministry asked me directly: where does the Gospel stand in your work? She was concerned that pursuing healing across social and racial lines, without explicitly proclaiming Christ, was just good deeds — temporary relief before eternal suffering, in her words. And she’s not wrong to notice something. I have been quieter about proclamation in the traditional sense. That’s been intentional — though I’m still working out why, exactly.

Part of it is the baggage. The way certain language has been used to exclude the very people I’m trying to be present to. Part of it is something harder to name — a sense that the container I was handed for the Gospel is real but not quite big enough for everything I’m encountering of God in the actual world. I’m not walking away from any of it. I’m trying to understand it more fully. And I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own need to have it all resolved before I speak. So when she asked her question — and she meant it with genuine care — I sat with it seriously, because it deserved that.

What I kept returning to was the text she herself had cited. Jesus going throughout all the cities and villages, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. Not proclaiming, and also healing as a separate activity. The healing was part of the same sentence. Part of the same proclamation.

That grammatical reality matters. In the Gospel accounts, Jesus doesn’t finish his sermon and then pivot to medical ministry as a separate program. The healing is the announcement. When a body is restored, when someone excluded by their illness is welcomed back into community, when the person everyone had written off is made whole — that is the kingdom of God being declared present and active. The deed and the word are not competing. They are the same thing arriving in different forms.

This is why I keep coming back to the Lord’s Prayer as the center of it all. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus didn’t teach his disciples to pray for escape. He taught them to pray for arrival — for the reality of heaven to land here, in this world, in these bodies, in these communities. That prayer is not a wish for somewhere else. It is a declaration that this world is the place God intends to make new.

What If It Was Never Just About One Person?

There’s something else worth naming here. The framework my supporter was working from — and one I absorbed early too — is deeply individualist. Salvation as a private transaction: my sin, my belief, my eternal life. Proclamation as one person delivering that news to another person. There is truth in that. But it’s a partial truth.

The kingdom language Jesus used is inherently communal. You cannot have a kingdom with one person in it. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, he taught them to pray it together, and to pray it for the world. The Gospel was never only about rescuing individual souls out of a burning building. It was about the building itself — the whole created order — being made new.

What If It’s Bigger Than Rescue?

Some of us grew up in traditions that taught a very specific story about how history ends. The world gets worse. The church’s job is proclamation — get as many people to safety before the end comes. Social transformation is at best a distraction and at worst a kind of false hope, investing in a world that is already destined for destruction. I grew up near that framework. I recognize it. For a lot of people I love, it is home.

But I’ve come to believe it asks too little of the Gospel. It shrinks the good news down to an evacuation plan. And it leaves us with a Jesus who taught his disciples to pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven — and didn’t mean it.

The kingdom is not only coming. It is already breaking in. And we are invited to live as if that is true.

What If Heaven and Earth Were Always Meant to Meet?

A book that has been helping me find language for what I’ve long felt is NT Wright’s The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God. Wright argues that God’s plan in the Messiah Jesus was to sum up the whole cosmos in him — everything in heaven and on the earth. Not just souls. The whole thing.

He goes further: the humanity of Jesus wasn’t simply a necessity for the purposes of rescue. It was the fulfillment of the creator’s original purpose. And the true humanity of Jesus’ followers is designed to display to the world what human life was meant to be like.¹

That sentence stopped me. Display to the world what human life was meant to be like.

That’s not a footnote to the Gospel. That’s a vocation. And Wright names it plainly: the church’s calling is to live as a small working model of new creation.1

A working model. Not a waiting room.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Ephesians 2. Wright argues that the breaking down of the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile — two peoples with centuries of separation, mutual suspicion, and unequal power between them — is not simply a social benefit of the Gospel. It is the Gospel made visible. The reconciliation of divided peoples as a sign to the watching world of what God is doing.

Wright said it plainly in a recent conversation: Jesus broke down the barrier between Jew and Gentile in order to create a single new humanity out of disparate elements. This wasn’t a social byproduct of the Gospel. It was the point.2 And when the church lost sight of that vision — as Wright argues it did in the 17th and 18th centuries — it lost the theological ground to object to slavery and racial hierarchy. As he put it: “You can’t get the fruits without the roots. The roots are the Christian gospel itself.”3

And then Ephesians 3:10 takes it even further — that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God would be made known to rulers and authorities, to principalities and powers. The church’s existence as a reconciled, multi-peopled community is itself described as a proclamation. Not a preparation for proclamation. Not a nice outcome of proclamation. The thing itself.

That reframes everything. A community where people across racial, cultural, and social lines are genuinely reconciled and learning to flourish together is not a distraction from the Gospel. In Paul’s framing, it is one of the loudest things the church can say.

Where Does That Leave Us?

This is where my theology has landed, and continues to land. I believe salvation is not only for the afterlife. I believe the Gospel is good news for now — that God is actively at work making all things new, and that we are invited to participate in that. When I work toward healing across racial and cultural lines, when I sit with the reality that some systems are set up to advantage some and disadvantage others, when I ask what it would look like for communities to actually flourish — I am not doing that instead of the Gospel.

I am doing it because of it.

I also want to say something about sin, because I think this is where a lot of the pushback I receive comes from. I believe sin is personal. I believe each of us is accountable before God for our own choices, our own turning away. That hasn’t changed for me.

But personal doesn’t mean only personal. Scripture is full of communal sin — the ways that whole peoples, whole systems, whole inherited structures can be bent away from what God intended. When I look at communities where disadvantage and advantage are not randomly distributed, where some people’s flourishing has been built on other people’s diminishment, I don’t see a political problem that has wandered into theology. I see exactly what happens when communities — not just individuals — turn away from the vision of the kingdom. And I believe the Gospel is big enough, and the redemption of Christ is thorough enough, to address that too.

This is not the Gospel plus something else. This is what it looks like to take the Gospel seriously in the actual world.

And If You’re Not Sure About Any of This?

I want to say something directly to those of you reading who don’t share my faith — or who have been hurt by it, which is a different and more complicated thing. Some of the people I respect most in this work are not Christians. And if I’m honest, I carry a quiet embarrassment about what the Christian witness has often looked like to them — the ways the faith I love has been used to exclude, to harm, to provide cover for the very injustices I’m trying to address. I don’t want to skip past that.

I’m not asking you to share my belief. I’m asking whether you’ve felt the pull of the same vision — that human dignity is worth defending, that divided communities can be repaired, that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be. If you have, I think we’re already in the same conversation.

What I want you to see here is a different kind of witness. Not Christianity asking you to overlook its track record, but Christianity being held accountable to its own deepest vision. That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t always get it right. But that’s what the work is.

For me, faith is what’s underneath all of it. It’s what the work grows from. I wanted you to know that — and I wanted you to know it honestly.

In the next post I want to address something I hear often: that talking about systemic sin means blaming people for the past. I don’t think that’s what Scripture asks of us — but I do think it asks something. More on that soon.

What about you — has your understanding of faith and action evolved over time? What are the questions you are wrestling with? I’d love to hear what’s in your soil.

Would you consider joining me this summer?

https://www.rootedmosaic.org/racial-justice-for-the-long-haul

Footnotes

Tonight, I want to introduce you to Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 1962, this Mississippi sharecropper went to the courthouse to register to vote. She was 44 years old and had never been allowed to try before. She was denied the right to vote because she failed the literacy test, a requirement not equally applied to illiterate white people at the time.

She kept going anyway. After three tries, she passed the literacy test but was denied again because she would have to pay a poll tax. These taxes were technically race-neutral and applied to certain white voters as well, but in practice, the law was applied loosely for whites and with a hard line for Black voters.

Eventually, Hamer was able to pay the poll tax, but that was far harder when economic opportunity was scarce because of the color of one’s skin.

Trying to vote caused her to be evicted from the plantation where she’d lived and worked for 18 years, shot at by white supremacists, and later arrested and beaten so severely in a Mississippi jail that she suffered permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye.

Two years later, she stood before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention and testified about what Black Americans faced simply for trying to participate in democracy. Her testimony was so powerful that President Johnson, fearing the political fallout, called an emergency press conference to pull the cameras away from her. It didn’t work. America heard her anyway.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It said, plainly: you cannot draw electoral district lines to cancel out a community’s votes. You cannot use the machinery of government to make sure certain people’s votes never add up to actual representation. And it worked. Black voter registration surged. Black candidates won office. Communities that had been deliberately locked out of political power started to have a voice.

Then the courts looked at that progress and said. “See, things are better now. You don’t need this law anymore.” That’s like removing stitches from a wound and calling it healed, and then being surprised when it reopens.

So many people today believe that we are past the need for the Voting Rights Act, and some even think that white people are the ones being discriminated against, which is precisely the argument being used to dismantle the protections that Hamer gave everything to win.

I was born in 1976, and I was taught to be colorblind. This was no accident. Not to be racist, meant you should not see color at all. People would use Martin Luther King Jr.’s words — “content of their character” — out of context to justify making it socially unacceptable to talk about race; however, that silence increased the chances that the systems racism had built were not being recognized, let alone dismantled.

In the 1970s, the dominant white narrative was that America had looked at itself, recognized its sin, passed the laws, and leveled the playing field. Busing and affirmative action became the flashpoints, reframed not as remedies for documented exclusion but as reverse discrimination against white people who “had nothing to do with slavery.” This is the decade where “I’m not racist, I just think everyone should be treated equally” became the standard deflection.

In the 1980s, the word racism was quietly replaced with the word culture. Racial disparities were explained as the result of Black culture — broken families, welfare dependence, and a lack of work ethic. This is the era that gave us the “welfare queen” myth popularized by Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign. He repeatedly told the story of a woman from Chicago's South Side who had used dozens of fake names, addresses, and Social Security cards to collect welfare checks, veterans' benefits, and food stamps, implying she was living lavishly off government assistance while hardworking taxpayers footed the bill. The story was wildly exaggerated, and the woman at its center, while real, bore almost no resemblance to Reagan's telling of it.

In the 1990s, multiculturalism became the buzzword. We celebrated Black History Month and learned about Black culture, but rarely learned the full history of slavery, segregation, lynching, and economic disenfranchisement that shaped it. At the same time, the “war on drugs” was quietly becoming a war on Black communities. The US went from roughly 300,000 people incarcerated in 1980 to over 2 million by the early 2000s, with that population being disproportionately Black.

One of the clearest examples of how this happened is the difference in how crack and powder cocaine were treated under the law. They are the same drug in different forms; the only meaningful difference is that crack was cheaper, making it the option available to poor Black communities, while powder cocaine was the drug of choice in wealthier white ones. But in 1986, Congress made the penalties for crack 100 times harsher than for powder, with no scientific basis whatsoever. Black Americans were being incarcerated at rates five times higher than white Americans, largely for drug offenses that white Americans committed at the same frequency but were rarely prosecuted for.

💛 Upgrade nudge: If you’ve been with us for a while, there’s more waiting for you inside — personal essays, poems, and resources I save just for members. Come on in.

And here’s what that meant for voting: felony convictions strip voting rights in many states, either temporarily or permanently. The prison cell replaced the poll tax. It took Congress until 2010 to partially acknowledge the injustice and reduce the sentencing disparity — but by then an entire generation of Black men had already been incarcerated, families had been broken apart, and communities had been systematically stripped of political power in the process.

So fast forward to this week. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais that a congressional map Louisiana had drawn — which created a second majority-Black district — was an unconstitutional use of race. The map had been drawn specifically because courts found Louisiana’s previous map illegally diluted Black voting power under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. So Louisiana fixed it, and then the Supreme Court said the fix itself was illegal.

The ruling doesn’t even bother to claim racism is over. It says something more insidious: that the Constitution itself now forbids using race as a factor in fixing racial inequality in voting. The perpetrator and the victim are treated as the same.

Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t just fight for the right to cast a ballot. She fought for the right to have that ballot count — to have her community’s presence translate into actual political power. She understood that the vote was the lever that moved everything else: schools, hospitals, roads, safety, dignity.

The people dismantling her legacy aren’t doing it with fire hoses and billy clubs. They’re doing it with legal briefs and a Supreme Court majority. But the outcome she would recognize immediately — communities locked out of meaningful representation, by design, with the law’s blessing.

So here is my call to action: learn this history and share it. Talk about it at your dinner table, in your workplace, in your community. Contact your representatives and tell them you are paying attention. Support organizations on the ground doing voting rights work — groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Black Voters Matter. And vote in every election, at every level, especially local ones where district lines are drawn, and voting rules are made.

The people working to dismantle these protections are counting on our silence and distraction. The best thing we can do to honor Fannie Lou Hamer’s legacy is to refuse to give them either.

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

PS. This summer, I am pulling together a group of people who are wanting to build the muscles needed to stay in this work for the long haul. Join us!

🌳 DEEPLY ROOTED · Post 4 — Soil Series: An exploration of what it looks like to grow from the ground up.

In the summer of 1993, George Ella Lyon sat down with a composition book and started making lists. Not drafts, lists. The clothespins. The forsythia bush. The names her grandparents carried. The things her family said without explaining. She was responding to a question another writer, Jo Carson, had put into the world: I want to know when you get to be from a place. Lyon edited her lists into a poem, and that poem, "Where I'm From", has been shared far and wide, inspiring others to explore their own identities, cultures, origin stories, places, and people and then write their own.1

I find it fascinating that Lyon was moved to write this poem by a single line from her friend Jo Carson. Carson's "People Pieces" were poems written from the voices of real people she encountered in her life. People that she overheard in grocery store lines, beauty shops, and emergency rooms. The speaker of this particular piece was someone who believed they were without roots, someone who couldn't answer the question of where they were from. That feeling of rootlessness is what Lyon responded to, and I wonder if it is part of the key that can unlock the hold that white supremacy has on our culture.

I Am From (George Ella Lyon)

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride
I am from the dirt under the back porch
(Black, glistening
it tasted like beets)
I am from the forsythia bush,
the Dutch elm
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I’m from the fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from perk up and pipe down.
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
from the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded–
leaf-fall from the family tree

One of the many tragedies of Whiteness is that many immigrants of European descent lost a sense of who they are culturally. Describing where I am from, or who I am as a cultural being, has become increasingly difficult for white Americans to do. Ethnic studies, in the popular imagination, are for learning about African American or Latino culture. But I believe it is for us too.

Understanding ourselves as cultural beings is one of the first steps to disarming the hold that racism has on us. When we locate ourselves, when we become particular rather than default, we stop experiencing our way of life as simply normal and start seeing it as one way among many. That shift is small and enormous at the same time. It doesn’t erase the reality of white privilege or the harm that Whiteness has caused. But it begins to loosen the grip of something that has operated, for many of us, entirely below the surface.

It also opens a door to reclaiming what many of us surrendered to gain racial power: our ethnicity. Our Italian, Irish, Polish, German, English, Scandinavian, Eastern European roots. The stories of those particular places and people. When we can hold our own cultural distinctives with some curiosity and even pride, we become more capable of genuinely appreciating someone else’s, not as exotic, not as other, but as equally particular, equally rooted. We begin to see that our way is not the only way of being. That there are many ways of being human, and ours is just one of them.

So I want to invite you to write your own “I Am From” poem.

Before you write a single line, know this: you are first and foremost, not trying to produce a poem. You are making a list. George Ella Lyon didn’t sit down to write something beautiful, she opened a composition book and started naming things. The clothespins. The forsythia bush. The names her grandparents carried. The food on the table. She let the images come before the meaning, and the meaning came anyway. That’s your only job here. Start with what was just there: the objects, the smells, the phrases your family repeated without explaining. Don’t reach for the big themes yet. Don’t try to say anything about race, Whiteness, or history. Just name what you remember. The harder things will find their way in once your hand is moving.

When you’re ready to go a little deeper, try this: what did your family have that they never called luck? What did they move through without noticing, neighborhoods, schools, assumptions, that felt like just the way things were? What was never talked about at the table, and what does that silence tell you? You don’t have to answer those questions directly in your poem. But let them sit alongside you while you write. The “I am from” structure permits you to include the complicated alongside the tender, the inherited privilege next to the inherited love, without having to explain or resolve any of it. That’s the gift of the form.

Use it.

Resources:

1. This one-page worksheet guides you through the brainstorming process behind writing your own "I Am From" poem, moving from the concrete and sensory, through family and inheritance, into the silences and the specifically racialized material that most of us were never invited to name. It's designed to be printed and written on by hand, in a quiet moment, without pressure to produce anything polished.

2. Want to learn more about the history of racism in America? Watch this 8 1/2 minute video, “The History of White People in America.”

🌳 DEEPLY ROOTED · Post 3 — Soil Series: An exploration of what it looks like to grow from the ground up.

Deeply Rooted is a series built on a simple observation: trees don’t grow from the top down. They start in the soil, in the unseen, the underground, the slow work of roots finding their way. So do we. Moving through five stages — Soil, Roots, Trunk, Branches, Canopy — this series explores cultural identity development as a whole-person journey: mind, body, and soul. It is both healing work and justice work — beginning with the story of where you’ve come from, through the deeper work of understanding what has shaped you, into the integration and flourishing that becomes possible when you know where you’re rooted.

New here? Start at the beginning → [link] Find all posts in the series → [link]

Over the course of almost 50 years, 29 of those years as a legal adult living on my own, I have had the privilege of my life intersecting with so many people’s stories.

Suburban people, city folks, addicts, healers, kids from the country, kids from the “inner-city”, religious people, secular people, immigrants, those indigenous to America, Yinzers and uffda-ers, cancer survivors, poets, writers, musicians, number crunchers, neurotypical, neuro-spicy, cooks, knitters, machinists, nuclear engineers, priests, community activists, hippys and yuppies.

All of these people make the backdrop of my life, and have baked a certain kind of something into who I am and how I see the world today.

One thing is certain, I really do love people. I find them fascinating, all the complexities, all of the diversity, all of the ache, and all of the promise.

In the last post, I proposed that we are made to grow like a tree. The Soil is the story — the experiences, losses, relationships, and realities that have shaped you. That story is absorbed by the Roots — the Heart and Head — where it is held and made sense of. The Trunk is where your inner world and your outer life meet; what you believe begin to show up in how you live. From there, the Branches — your Hands — reach outward into action, creation, and contribution. And from all of that, if the roots go deep enough, comes Fruit — the overflow of a life that is integrated and growing.

Over the next several posts, I want to explore this picture of growth much like a tree. The stories we hold, the root systems that hold our understanding and emotions, the intersections of our internal and external world, and the ways that all of these branch out to produce fruit.

In a world full of fragments…

This integrated vision of humanity’s opportunity to grow like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding good fruit that nourishes the world, gives me hope that things do not need to stay as they are.

Things can change.

Neighborhoods, institutions, governments, schools, families, places of worship, our natural world- as long as we have breath and soil and light, there is hope.

So… what is it going to take?

First we need to examine the soil that we are planted in.

This soil tells a micro- and macro-story-

• The Micro Story (the intimate, personal soil)- The specific, close-in conditions that shaped you — the particular plot of ground your life grew from:

  • Family of origin — the exact texture of your household, parents, siblings

  • Childhood home(s) — physical places, neighborhoods, rooms

  • Early wounds and early gifts

  • The faith or worldview you were handed as a child

  • Formative relationships — teachers, mentors, friends who changed you

  • Personal failures and losses

  • The private interior life — temperament, longings, fears you were born with

  • Specific moments that became turning points

The Macro Story (the broader geological layer)

The larger forces that shaped the ground before you even arrived — what you were planted into:

• Historical era — the moment in history you were born into

• Culture, ethnicity, nationality

• Socioeconomic class and its invisible rules

• Religion or religious tradition as a collective inheritance

• Geography — region, climate, landscape

• Generational trauma or blessing passed down

• Political and social forces (war, migration, systemic realities)

• The arc of your people’s story before you

This is alot.

AND what an immense opportunity to understand how our roots shape our thoughts and feelings and produce actions and behaviors that impact the world.

What if this is the work that unlocks the transformation our world needs?

So… I ready to take a deep dive. Your soil is unique. My soil is too. Some parts are rocky and nutrient-light, and there are strong and sturdy ways our roots have adapted so that the wind doesn’t blow us down. No one else has stood in exactly the ground you have stood in. And that story is worth understanding.

So… are you joining me for the journey?

I'm forming a small cohort to work through this material together — six sessions, every two weeks, with guided conversation and accountability. If that sounds like what you need, click here to get on the interest list.

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Deeply Rooted is a series built on a simple observation: trees don’t grow from the top down. They start in the soil, in the unseen, the underground, the slow work of roots finding their way. So do we. Moving through five stages — Soil, Roots, Trunk, Branches, Canopy — this series explores cultural identity development as a whole-person journey: mind, body, and soul. It is both healing work and justice work — beginning with the story of where you’ve come from, through the deeper work of understanding what has shaped you, into the integration and flourishing that becomes possible when you know where you’re rooted.

New here? Start at the beginning → [link] Find all posts in the series → [link]

In my last post, I wrote about the tree.

About how a tree’s fruit is entirely dependent on what’s happening underground. About how most of us spend our energy working on what’s visible — the actions, the outcomes, the fruit — while the roots remain unexamined, drawing from soil we’ve never stopped to look at.

Today I want to take you underground.

Not because it’s comfortable down there. It isn’t, always. But because I believe — deeply, and from my own experience — that the soil of your story is not just the ground you grew from. It is sacred ground. And until we learn to treat it that way, we will keep relating to our past as something to overcome rather than something to honor.

Why story is the foundation

The Relational Growth Model places Story at the very base of the tree — below the roots, below everything. Not as a starting point you move past, but as the living soil the whole tree draws from continuously.

This means your story is not behind you. It is beneath you. It is present in every conversation you have, every room you walk into, every pattern you repeat or break. The experiences, relationships, losses, and moments of grace that have shaped you are not just biography. They are the material God has been working with all along.

There is a reason the Psalms are full of people rehearsing their story before God. Remember what you did. Remember where you brought us from. Remember who we were. This is not nostalgia. It is a spiritual practice — the practice of recognizing the hand of God in the ground of your life.

That is what we are doing today.

Before you begin

Find a quiet place. Give yourself at least thirty minutes — more if you can. Have something to write with.

This is not a performance. There are no right answers. You are not writing for anyone else. You are simply paying attention — to what is there, to what has shaped you, to what God may have been doing in the soil of your life long before you had language for it.

If something surfaces that feels too heavy to hold alone, that is not a sign to stop. It is a sign to bring it into relationship — with a trusted person, a therapist, a coach, or God directly. Story excavation is not meant to be done in isolation.

Begin with a breath. And begin.

Part one: Mapping the soil

These first prompts are about orientation — getting a sense of the ground before you dig deeper.

1. When you think about the family and community you were raised in, what are three words that come to mind?

Don’t overthink this. Write the first three words that arrive. Then sit with them. Where do they come from? Are they words of warmth, of wound, of complexity? All three can be true at once.

2. What is a story from your childhood or early life that you have told many times?

The stories we repeat are rarely accidental. They tend to carry something we are still working out — a value we absorbed, a wound we are still healing, a moment of grace we keep returning to. Write the story briefly. Then ask: why do I keep telling this one?

3. Who are the people who most shaped who you are — for better or harder?

Name them. You don’t have to write a full account of each one. Just name them, and beside each name write one thing they gave you — intended or not. A belief. A fear. A capacity. A question.

Part two: The quality of the soil

Soil isn’t just neutral ground. It has texture, composition, history. Some soil is rich and dark, full of what a tree needs to flourish. Some is compacted by too much weight over too many years. Some has been depleted. Most is a mixture.

These prompts invite you to look at the quality of what you grew from.

4. What did your story teach you about belonging?

Did you grow up knowing you had a place? Did you have to earn it? Was belonging conditional on performance, conformity, or silence? Or was it freely given?

Take a moment here. Belonging is one of the deepest human needs — and the messages we absorbed about it early become the water table of everything else.

5. What did your story teach you about worth?

Where did your sense of value come from? Achievement? Approval? Service? Faith? Or did you grow up with a settled sense that you were simply beloved — not for what you did but for who you were?

Be honest. Most of us absorbed a mixture. Name the mixture.

6. Was there a season of your life when the soil felt particularly thin — when the ground beneath you shifted or gave way?

Loss. Failure. Displacement. Betrayal. Transition. These seasons don’t just happen to us. They become part of us. Write about one of them — not to rehearse the pain, but to ask: what grew in me because of this? And what did I have to grieve?

Part three: Naming the sacred

This is the part most of us skip. We are willing to analyze our story. We are willing to process it. But we resist the invitation to call it holy.

And yet.

If God is the author of all things — if nothing in your life has been outside his reach or his redemptive gaze — then every part of your story, including the parts that broke you, has been held. Has been seen. Has been, in ways you may not yet fully understand, used.

This does not mean everything that happened to you was good. It was not. It does not mean God caused your pain. But it does mean that your story — all of it — is the ground in which God has been planting something. And it is worth asking what that is.

7. Looking back at your story, where can you now see the hand of God in places you couldn’t see it at the time?

This might be a person who arrived at exactly the right moment. A door that closed that turned out to be protection. A season of wilderness that quietly formed something in you that you now rely on. A wound that became a window into the lives of others.

Write what you see. Don’t force it. If you can’t see it yet — that is honest, and worth writing too.

8. What is a part of your story that you have not yet called sacred?

This is the harder question. The part you still relate to as a mistake, a detour, a source of shame, or simply something you’d rather not think about.

What would it mean to hold that part of your story the way God holds it — with full knowledge, without flinching, and without condemnation?

You don’t have to arrive at that place today. But write toward it.

9. If your story were a gift — imperfect, complex, and entirely yours — what would you say it has given you that nothing else could have?

Take your time with this one. It may be the most important question in this entire exercise.

A closing reflection

There is a phrase from the Psalms that I keep returning to: The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

It is not a naïve verse. David, who wrote it, knew suffering. He knew betrayal, failure, displacement, and the long silence of God. And yet he could look at the ground of his life and call it a delightful inheritance.

I don’t think that kind of perspective comes easily or quickly. I think it comes from exactly this kind of work — the slow, honest, prayerful practice of looking at your story and refusing to let any part of it be wasted.

Your soil is not an accident. Your roots grew in specific ground for specific reasons. And the tree you are becoming — the fruit you will bear, the shade you will give — is inseparable from the ground you came from.

Honor your soil. All of it.

Carry it forward

Before you close your journal, write one sentence that begins:

“Because of my story, I am uniquely able to...”

This is not a productivity exercise. It is an act of stewardship — of recognizing that what you have been given, even in difficulty, is not just yours to carry. It is yours to offer.

If something surfaced in this exercise that you’d like to explore further in a coaching conversation, I’d love to hear from you. This is exactly the kind of work we do together — underground, where it counts.

Deeply Rooted is a series built on a simple observation: trees don’t grow from the top down. They start in the soil, in the unseen, the underground, the slow work of roots finding their way. So do we. Moving through five stages — Soil, Roots, Trunk, Branches, Canopy — this series explores cultural identity development as a whole-person journey: mind, body, and soul. It is both healing work and justice work — beginning with the story of where you’ve come from, through the deeper work of understanding what has shaped you, into the integration and flourishing that becomes possible when you know where you’re rooted.

This is where the journey begins. Read all posts in the series → [link]

We want things to be different.

Different in our families, our organizations, our communities, our country. We see the fractures — the hierarchy, the erasure, the ways certain stories get centered while others get pushed to the margins — and something in us rises up and says: this is not how it’s supposed to be.

That instinct, I believe, is not accidental. It is the mark of people who were made for something more — who carry, whether they name it this way or not, a longing for the world as it was meant to be.

So we get to work. We attend the trainings. We write the policies. We build the coalitions. We do the programs.

And then, quietly, we burn out. Or we watch the same dynamics replicate themselves inside the very spaces we built to be different. Or we find ourselves doing the work of justice in the world while something in us remains unexamined, unchanged, still running on the old operating system.

I’ve been in that place. And it’s from that place that I want to offer something.

The question that changed how I see everything

A year ago, I was taking classes in a graduate program in Diversity Leadership, while looking for jobs that would let me use my skill set to advance equity and justice. I was an educator — by trade, by heart, by calling. I believed in systems change. I still do.

But I kept bumping into a question I couldn’t quite shake:

Why do the same wounds keep showing up in new containers?

Why do communities built around liberation sometimes reproduce the very dynamics they were formed to resist? Why do people who have read every book, attended every training, and articulated a beautiful vision for a more just world still struggle — in their marriages, their leadership, their inner lives — with the same patterns they’re trying to dismantle in the culture around them?

I didn’t have an answer. But I had a hunch — and honestly, a growing sense that God was trying to show me something: we had been working from the outside in, and something important was being missed.

A tree doesn’t produce fruit by focusing on its fruit

Eventually, I was introduced to a framework that gave language to what I’d been sensing. It’s called the Relational Growth Model, and it uses the image of a tree to describe how human beings actually change.

The image is ancient, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

A tree’s fruit — what it produces, what it offers to the world — is entirely dependent on what’s happening underground. The roots draw nourishment. The trunk integrates what comes from below and channels it upward. The branches reach outward. The canopy provides shade and abundance for everything around it.

You can work on the fruit all you want. You can prune it, polish it, hold it up to the light. But if the roots are shallow or the trunk is fractured, the fruit will reflect that — no matter how good your intentions are.

The same is true of people. And I believe it is how we were made to grow.

The Relational Growth Model maps five layers of how we grow:

Story is the soil. The experiences, losses, relationships, and realities that have shaped you are not just background — they are the ground everything else grows from. You cannot understand where you’re going without honoring where you’ve been. Every story is sacred. Yours is too.

Heart and Head are the root system. We navigate life through two channels: the heart, which relates and feels, and the head, which understands and makes meaning. Healthy growth draws from both. When one gets cut off — when we lead all from analysis and suppress feeling, or when we’re overwhelmed by emotion and can’t find clarity — the whole system weakens.

Personal Integration is the trunk. This is where the underground meets the above-ground. It’s the slow, often uncomfortable work of taking what we’ve experienced and understood and letting it become genuinely part of who we are — not just what we know, but who we’re becoming. This is where I believe the most important work happens. Not performance. Not fixing. Integration. The kind of deep becoming that I believe only happens in relationship — with ourselves, with others, and with the One who made us.

Hands are the branches — the actions, creations, and contributions that extend from a rooted self into the world. When your actions flow from who you genuinely are, they carry a different quality. They’re sustainable. They’re honest. They don’t require you to maintain a version of yourself that isn’t real.

Abundance and Overflow is the canopy. When the roots are healthy and the trunk is strong, something begins to spill outward — into your relationships, your community, your culture. This is what I think of as good fruit. You don’t have to manufacture it. You don’t have to force it. It overflows — because that is what a deeply rooted life does.

The both/and most people miss

Here’s where I want to push back against a false choice that gets made in almost every conversation about transformation.

On one side: personal growth is a luxury. Real change is structural. Stop navel-gazing and get to work.

On the other side: just heal yourself and everything else will follow. Inner work is the only work.

Both of these positions, held alone, are incomplete — and in their incompleteness, they leave people stuck.

I think we were made for a both/and that refuses to let go of either side.

You are not just growing for yourself. Every person is embedded in a family, a community, a culture. What happens inside you finds its way into all of them — whether you intend it or not. Your unexamined wounds shape the room. Your integrated self shapes the room differently.

But individual transformation was never meant to replace structural change. The goal is not to produce a collection of well-healed individuals in an unchanged world. The goal is people who, because they have done the harder, slower work of becoming whole, are now able to build, lead, and create in ways that don’t replicate the old patterns — because those patterns no longer live unexamined inside them.

Cultural transformation doesn’t come from the outside in. It comes from the inside out.

And I believe that is, at its core, the way of the Kingdom.

What this means for the work I’m doing

I came to coaching skeptically. I’m an educator. I believe in teaching, in the big picture, in calling people into a larger story. I wasn’t sure I could hold back — could sit with someone and trust them to find their own way rather than offering what I knew.

What shifted was prayer, and paying attention. I started to notice how God seemed to be leading — opening a door here, confirming a direction there — and I took a step forward without seeing the whole staircase. That, I’ve come to believe, is often how the most important things begin.

What I found on the other side was that coaching and education don’t have to be in opposition. They can hold different parts of the same work. The big picture and the individual path. The vision and the person in front of you.

The vision I’m holding — what I call Rooted Mosaic — is this:

A world that has moved beyond hierarchy and erasure. Where every distinct piece, every story, every culture, every contradiction is honored as sacred, beloved, and part of the whole we were created to be — together forming something larger, stronger, and more beautiful than we could create alone.

That’s not a program. It’s not a policy. It’s a kind of person — many kinds of people — who have been rooted deeply enough in their own identity and story that they can hold space for the full mosaic without needing to flatten it.

I believe that person is possible. I believe we were made for exactly this. And I believe coaching is one of the ways we help that person emerge.

An invitation

If you’ve felt the tension between personal growth and collective transformation — if you’ve wondered whether tending to yourself is selfish, or whether changing systems is enough, or whether there’s a way to hold both — I want you to know: that tension is not a problem to solve. It’s a sign that you’re paying attention to the whole picture.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s a sign that you were made for more than one thing at once.

The work is both. The work starts underground.

I’m building something here on Substack — a space to think out loud about transformation, culture, identity, and the kind of inside-out change that I believe the world is waiting for.

I’d love for you to be part of it.

I’m currently completing my ICF coaching certification through North Point Academy and Redemptive Coaching and building Rooted Mosaic — a coaching practice pursuing cultural transformation from the inside out. If something here resonated, subscribe to follow along, or reach out directly.

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