What Hard Times Show...

     I remember hearing at some point in my childhood, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." I imagine my father probably said it to encourage me to finish that last street on the paper route some early winter morning, as we shivered together. I think there is truth in that statement. Tough times have a way of showing who we really are.

     My very sad backyard has provoked this deep introspection. When Anthony and I bought our house almost two years ago, one of the things we loved was the landscaping in the backyard. The previous owners had planted a variety of shrubs and trees, including a tall aspen, all along the wood fence. It was lush and green, a birds' paradise with plenty of places for nesting and raising a little bird family. We thought up keep of the yard would be fairly easy as an in-ground sprinkler system was already in place. Our first mistake was to think that owning a sprinkler system would be easy. But that is a story for another time.  

    In case you have not noticed, we are going through a drought here in sunny Oklahoma. A drought that actually started last fall. I did not think much of having a dry winter, until I started to notice the bushes in the backyard, especially the tall aspen. The aspen was more of a brittle brown then a lush green. I was perplexed by the BDR, bush death rate, in my backyard before it was even hot. The BDR was especially confusing as the bushes in the front yard and the pecan in the middle of the backyard were fine. I even confess to doing a little research on the web, trying to find something that would kill an aspen and a holly bush but spare a pecan. There is no such disease.

   One day I finally realized what had killed my backyard. Hard times had killed my aspen and it's leafy neighbors. Our sprinkler system, which runs along the edge of the yard, was winterized in October and until the following March the aspen had to depend on it's own shallow roots for water. The aspen never had to grow deep roots. Even in the hot summer months, water was easily plentiful because of the sprinkler head a yard from it's trunk. Any other year it would have been fine but without rain the mighty aspen dried up into kindling. On the other hand, the pecan is in the middle of the yard and appears to have been planted before the watering system was installed. Without easy access to water, the pecan had to grow long, deep roots to survive the treacherous summers.
  
    People are often like my backyard. At first sight, everything looks and feels perfect. It is not until circumstances come our way to do we see what we or others are made of.  Do our roots run deep from daily study of the Word or are our roots superficial, living on the water we get each Sunday? Do hard times cause us to shrivel up and die inside or are we able to draw from our roots and keep right on going? The same hard time that might kill one thing, will make another grow stronger. It is all a matter of roots.
  
     The tough keep going, only because of what they do before the going gets tough.