Faith That Remains Rooted During Change
Change can shake everything except a faith grounded in God.
Claire Beaumont had lived in the same house for twenty-two years, shopped at the same grocery store, attended the same church, and driven the same route to work so many times she could have navigated it with her eyes closed.
She was not, by nature, a woman who resisted change because she was afraid of it. She simply had not needed to change very much, and over the years the stability of her life had become something she had quietly, without particularly deciding to, built her sense of security on. The routines. The familiar. The known.
Which made the twelve months that began in September of her fifty-first year feel like standing on ground that had decided, without consulting her, to stop being ground.
It started with the job. Claire was a senior administrator at a regional hospital in Lyon, a role she had held for eleven years and performed with the particular competence of someone who knows a complex system thoroughly and keeps it running through sheer, practised knowledge. The hospital underwent a significant restructuring. Her department was merged with another. Her role was redesigned in ways that kept her employed but changed almost everything about what the employment actually looked like. New team, new reporting lines, new processes, new building.
She managed the transition professionally and without visible complaint, because that was who she was. But the ground was less solid than it had been.
Then her youngest child, her daughter Elise, who had been living at home while finishing her degree, moved to Bordeaux for a graduate position. The house, which had always been full in the comfortable, ambient way of a home with people coming and going, became very quiet. Not unhappily so. But differently. Noticeably.
Then her husband, Laurent, was offered a secondment to his company's Brussels office. Eighteen months. It was a good opportunity for him and they both knew it. They talked about it honestly and she encouraged him to accept, meaning it. But the meaning it and the living it turned out to be two different experiences, and the house that had already become quieter became quieter still.
Three significant changes in less than a year. None of them tragic. All of them real.
Claire found herself, on a grey Tuesday morning in February, standing in her kitchen in the house that felt like a different house than it had been a year ago, drinking coffee she had made out of habit rather than desire, and registering something she had not expected to feel: untethered.
She was a woman of faith. Had been for thirty years. Her faith was not decorative or intermittent. It was woven into the fabric of how she understood herself and the world. She prayed, she read Scripture, she served in her church's pastoral visiting team on Saturday mornings with genuine love for the work.
But standing in that kitchen, she was aware of something uncomfortable: she had not realised, until everything around her shifted, how much of what she had been calling her security had actually been the stability of her circumstances rather than the stability of her faith. The two had coexisted so peacefully for so long that she had not noticed they were separate things.
She had been rooted in her routines. She had thought she was rooted in God.
The distinction, once seen, was difficult to unsee.
She brought it to her friend and spiritual companion, a woman named Sylvie, who was three years older, had been through her own significant season of upheaval, and had the specific, unsentimental wisdom of someone who had already learned what Claire was currently being invited to learn.
They walked together on Saturday mornings when the pastoral visiting allowed, through a park near Claire's house, a habit they had maintained for seven years in all weathers.
Claire told Sylvie what she had been observing in herself: the untethered feeling, the realisation about where her security had actually been placed, the slightly disconcerting discovery that her faith, which she had considered well-established, was revealing some dependencies she had not known were there.
Sylvie walked quietly for a moment before responding. That was her way. She did not fill silences prematurely.
"Do you know the difference between a tree that has grown in sheltered ground and one that has grown in exposed ground?" she asked.
Claire waited.
"The one in the shelter grows faster and looks healthier for longer," Sylvie said. "But its root system is shallow because it has never needed to reach deep. The exposed tree grows more slowly. It gets buffeted. It looks more weathered. But its roots go down further than you would believe, because every wind that pushed it made it push back harder into the ground."
She glanced at Claire.
"The winds are not your enemy," she said. "They are the thing that is making you find out how deep your roots actually go. And if they are not as deep as you thought, well. Now is a good time to grow them."
Claire thought about that for the rest of the walk and for several days afterward.
She opened her Bible that week with a different question than she usually brought to it. Not: what comfort can I find here? But: what does it actually mean to be rooted in God rather than in circumstances? What does that look like in practice, not in theory?
She found herself in Jeremiah 17:7-8, a passage she had read before but had perhaps not needed the way she needed it now: "Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."
It does not fear when heat comes.
Not: it is not touched by the heat. Not: it never experiences the heat. It does not fear when the heat comes. Because the roots go down to something that the heat cannot reach. A water source underneath the surface, constant and unaffected by what the weather is doing above it.
The root system was the thing. Not the visible, above-ground appearance of the tree, which could look stressed during hard seasons regardless of the health of what was underneath. But the roots: those invisible, unglamorous, essential connections to the source that kept the tree alive and fruitful when everything on the surface was difficult.
She began, with the deliberateness of someone who has understood what needs to be built, working on her roots.
She introduced a practice she had not been consistent about before: a midday pause. Not a long one. Ten minutes, wherever she was, in which she deliberately reconnected to what she knew to be true about God rather than what she was currently feeling about her circumstances. She was not trying to manufacture feelings she did not have. She was choosing to return, like a compass needle returning to north, to the fixed things: God is constant. God is good. God has not changed because my circumstances have. What He said yesterday He still means today.
It was a small practice. It had a larger effect than she anticipated.
She began to notice, over the weeks that followed, that the untethered feeling was not disappearing, exactly, but it was changing in character. Less like falling and more like floating. Less like a crisis and more like an adjustment. As if the roots, being worked on, were beginning to hold in a way that the surface disruption could push against but could not uproot.
She spoke to her pastor, Father Antoine, a gentle and thoughtful man who had been in ministry long enough to recognise the spiritual significance of disorienting seasons without dramatising them. He listened to her account of the year and the question she had been sitting with: what does rooted faith actually look like when the comfortable circumstances that have been holding it in place are removed?
He thought for a moment and then said something she wrote in her journal that evening.
"Faith that has only been tested in calm water is real faith," he said. "But it does not yet know its own strength. The seasons that disturb our comfort are not evidence that our faith has failed. They are the first real evidence that it is being asked to do what it was built to do. And faith that has been asked to hold and has held: that is faith that knows itself."
Faith that knows itself. She kept returning to that phrase.
Because what she had been experiencing, she was starting to understand, was not the weakening of her faith but the education of it. She was learning, through the specific curriculum of an unsettled year, what her faith was actually made of when the surrounding structure of familiar, stable, comfortable life was not providing the support she had been attributing to the faith itself.
It was made of more than she had feared. It was also requiring more of her than it ever had before.
She started calling Laurent on Tuesday evenings, which became a ritual neither of them had planned but both of them needed. The distance had been difficult in ways neither had fully anticipated, and the Tuesday calls were where they said the true things rather than just the fine things. She found that the honesty of those calls built something between them that the proximity of daily life had perhaps not required. It was a gift she had not expected to find in a difficulty she had not chosen.
She joined a small weekly lectio divina group at her church: four women sitting together with a short passage of Scripture, reading it slowly, listening for what it had to say specifically, sharing what had landed without commentary or discussion. It was the quietest ninety minutes of her week and, increasingly, the most nourishing.
She was growing roots. Not quickly. Not dramatically. But steadily, in the direction of something that did not move when her circumstances did.
Elise came home for a long weekend in April, and they walked together through the Saturday market in their neighbourhood, the one Claire had visited for twenty years without thinking much about it, and suddenly, for reasons she could not have fully explained, the familiar stalls and the familiar smells and the familiar sound of the market arriving at the familiar time on the familiar Saturday morning felt like exactly enough.
Not because nothing had changed. Because she had changed, in the small but significant way of a person who has found something underneath the changing things that does not change.
She bought bread and flowers and a small jar of honey from the beekeeper who had been there every Saturday since before Elise was born, and she walked home with her daughter's arm linked through hers, and she felt: rooted.
Not rooted in the market or the bread or the house she was returning to. Rooted in the thing beneath all of it. The constant, unchanged, entirely reliable presence that had been there before the job changed and before the house went quiet and before Laurent went to Brussels and would be there through whatever came next.
She had known that in theory for thirty years.
She knew it differently now. More deeply. More personally.
The way a tree knows the water that runs beneath it: not because it can see it, but because it has sent its roots all the way down and found it there.
That kind of knowing does not leave when the seasons change.
It is the whole point of the roots.
"Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green." Jeremiah 17:7-8
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