You Never Decide to Drift

Nobody ever decides to kill a houseplant. You do not stand over it one morning and choose to let it die. You get busy, and you miss a watering, which is nothing, and then you miss another, and weeks later you notice the leaves have gone crisp and the soil has pulled away from the sides of the pot. You did not do anything. That was the problem. It died of a hundred days you meant to water it and didn’t.

Your walk with God dies the same way, and you keep watching for the wrong thing. You are braced for the day you decide to walk away, so you can catch yourself and refuse. That day never comes. You do not quit God. You miss a morning, and another, and one day you look up and cannot remember the last time you opened the Word, and the leaf is already dry. Nobody decides to drift. You only notice you have.

Which is why the psalm does not describe the person who lasts as someone with iron discipline. It describes a tree. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3, ESV). A tree by a stream does not stay green by trying. It stays green because its roots have grown down into the water, so it drinks without deciding to, and it does not fear the dry months, because it is not living off the last rain, it is standing in the river. Jeremiah draws the same tree and names the very part you are after, the roots: Jeremiah 17:8He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17:8, ESV) That is the thing to become. Not a potted plant that dies the first week you forget it, but a tree whose roots have found the stream. You never decide to drift. You only notice you have. So you do not fight it with willpower. You grow your roots toward the water, and you stay planted there.

Growing roots is slower and more daily than any resolution. It is turning to God this morning when you are dry and feel nothing and would rather not, and again tomorrow, and again, until reaching for him is less a decision you make each day than a direction you have grown. It is keeping yourself within reach of the stream, holding the first minutes of the day before the phone takes them and the last before sleep. And it is keeping some of the water in you, a line learned by heart, so you do not go dry the moment you step away from the bank. “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth” (Joshua 1:8, ESV).

So stop asking how this morning felt. Ask which way your roots are growing. Has it been since Tuesday, and you called it a busy week? Have the quiet minutes gone back to the screen? When you reach for God in the middle of your day, is he close, or have you been standing on dry ground so long the water is out of reach?

One thing keeps this from becoming a lash. A dry spell is not a dying tree, and from the outside they look the same. There are months you go to him and pray and show up and it still feels like nothing, and you decide you have fallen away when your roots are as deep in the water as they have ever been. The difference was never the feeling; the feeling is identical. The difference is which way you are still reaching. David is as dry as a man can be and still leaning toward the well: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you… in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1, ESV). Bone dry, roots still in the river. That is a dry spell. Drift is when the roots have quietly pulled back from the water and you barely felt them go. So do not panic in the drought, and do not sleep through the drying. Which one you are in is answered by where your roots are, not how you feel.

You will never decide to leave. You will only wake up dry. So send your roots toward the water today, before you feel like it, and stay where it can reach you.