Growth Requires Roots

I was recently chastised for holding to outdated beliefs and told that I should be focusing on growing as a person instead. There are many fallacies in that statement.

To illustrate my point, all I need to do is turn to that “outdated” Book for an example. The parable of the sower fits the bill perfectly. I’ll leave it to you to look up the story if the details escape you, but the summary is that the seeds that fell on poor ground, rocky, packed, etc., failed to grow. The seed that fell on the good soil flourished. Why is that? The reason is that the other plants lacked roots. Without a good root system, the plants can’t get the nourishment they need.

So many people look to the Bible and only pull out the things they like. The love and kindness toward fellow man and all the feel good things. They then do this with all of the other “good books”. They just pull out the things that they like and try to implement them and they call this growth and enlightenment.

The problem is, they have no roots. They are not grounded in anything. They’re taking in a bunch of feel good concepts from a bunch of different sources, but they’re rooted in nothing. If you’re going to grow, you’ve got to be rooted in something. My foundational beliefs come from the Bible. I take it as a package. I learn from it as a package. Yes some of the things are hard. How do you hate a sin while still loving the one doing the sinning? How do you stamp out evil while still being loving? These are hard concepts. By meditating on them and learning from our failures to do just that, we grow. And our growth is sustained by being rooted in something of value, not in just a feel good belief.