There is a difference between an address and a place. An address is where your post goes. A place is where people notice when you don’t come out to sweep the verandah for three days, and someone knocks to check you are all right.
Plenty of us have lived at an address for years without it becoming a place. We drive in behind the gate at night and out again in the morning. We know the neighbours’ cars better than their names. We might own the house outright and still, in a sense, be passing through. Others, sometimes in a rented room, seem to belong to a street within months. Everyone knows them. They are at the funerals and the christenings. They know whose child passed the exams.
The difference is roots. And roots, like most living things, grow slowly.
What trees know
Anyone who has planted a fruit tree knows that for the first year or two, most of the growth is invisible. The young tree seems to sit there doing very little above ground. Underneath, it is spreading roots, finding water, anchoring itself. Only later, once the roots are established, does it shoot upwards, and only then can it survive a strong wind.
Paul used the same image when he prayed for the church in Ephesus. He asked that they would be “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17, NKJV). Rooted, like a tree. Grounded, like a building on a foundation. Both pictures describe something that takes time, and that makes the difference when storms come.
Belonging is a series of small choices
If love is the soil that roots grow in, then belonging to a place is built out of many small choices to love the people there. None of them is dramatic:
- Learning the names of the people on either side and across the road, and using them.
- Shopping at the small shop on the corner sometimes, even when the supermarket is cheaper.
- Turning up when there is a death on the street, even if you only knew the person to wave to.
- Being patient with the neighbour’s noisy celebration once a year, knowing yours may be noisy too.
- Joining the effort when the road needs clearing after a storm, or the community needs a voice at a meeting.
Paul’s famous description of love in 1 Corinthians 13 begins with two plain words: love is patient, love is kind. On a street, patience and kindness are mostly exercised in small ways, repeated for years. That is how roots grow.
Why many of us stay shallow
There are good reasons why roots don’t grow. Some people move often, for work or rent or family, and never stay long enough. Many in the diaspora live with one foot in two countries, and the new street never quite feels like home because home is somewhere else. Crime can make people wary of opening the gate. And modern life simply gives us less reason to depend on neighbours: we have delivery apps, private water tanks, generators and group chats with friends across town.
Some of this is outside our control. But some of it is choice. It is possible to live in a place for ten years and decide, in a hundred small ways, not to belong to it. It is also possible to decide the opposite, even if you know you may move on in a few years.
Roots make us stronger
There is a practical reason to care about this. When trouble comes, rooted people are rarely alone. The family that is known on the street gets help when the roof lifts in a storm. The elderly widow whose neighbours are used to checking on her is found quickly when she falls. The young couple who took the trouble to befriend the older man next door find, when they have a baby, that they have a willing grandfather over the fence.
A shallow-rooted tree can look fine for years, until the wind blows. So can a household.
Rooted first in God’s love
Paul’s prayer, though, is not mainly about neighbourliness. It is about being rooted in God’s love for us, a love so wide and long and high and deep that it “passes knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19, NKJV). The roots that hold us steady in every storm reach down into that love first.
And perhaps that is what frees us to love a place. People secure in God’s love don’t need a street to make them feel important, or a house to prove their worth. They can afford to be patient with difficult neighbours, generous with time and slow to take offence. They can put down roots wherever God has placed them, for as long as He places them there.
So this week, perhaps, learn one new name on your road. Stop and talk instead of driving straight in. Take something over the fence. It won’t feel like much. But that is how roots begin: quietly, below the surface, where no one sees them growing until the day they are needed.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗