"I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."
— John 15:5
Nobody talks about what happens underground.
We see the flower. We see the fruit. We see the tree that's been standing for decades, rooted so deep that nothing can move it. But nobody talks about what happened in the dark, underneath the soil, before any of that was visible.
Roots grow in the dark.
Before a seed becomes anything worth seeing, it goes through something that looks like nothing. It's buried. It's hidden. There's no evidence from the outside that anything is happening at all. And yet underground, in the quiet and the dark, everything that will eventually hold that plant upright is being built.
That's exactly what God does in the hard seasons of your life.
I used to think that if I couldn't see progress, there wasn't any. If things weren't changing on the outside, nothing was happening. So, I'd get frustrated. I'd get impatient. I'd convince myself that God wasn't working because I couldn't see it yet.
But He was working. He's always working.
The season where you feel buried is not a season of punishment. It's a season of preparation. The roots He's building in you right now, in the quiet, in the struggle, in the moments nobody else sees. Those are the roots that will hold you when the storms come later.
The Crown of Thorns wasn't beautiful in the moment. Nothing about that Friday looked like victory. From the outside it looked like defeat. It looked like the end. But something was happening that nobody could see yet. And three days later the whole world found out what it was.
Your dark season is not your defeat. It's your root system being built.
Stay planted. Stay in Him. Keep showing up even when you can't see the fruit yet. Because the same God who brought life out of a sealed tomb can bring life out of whatever season you're standing in right now.
What's growing in your dark will carry you further than anything that grew in the easy.
— Austin, Founder of TheRisenKing