The Garden That Refused to Stay Dead

In March 2012, landscape architect Emily Sullivan walked through the grounds of a Joplin, Missouri, church that had been leveled by an EF5 tornado ten months earlier. The building was gone. The parking lot was a maze of cracks. Every tree had been stripped or snapped. The soil itself seemed lifeless — compacted, gray, choked with debris.

But Emily noticed something. Along the foundation line, where the old fellowship hall once stood, tiny green shoots were pressing through the rubble. Daffodil bulbs, planted years before by a women's Bible study group, were pushing up through crushed concrete and shattered glass. No one had watered them. No one had tended the soil. The life stored inside those bulbs simply would not stay buried.

Emily later told a reporter, "The destruction was total on the surface. But underground, something had been alive the whole time, just waiting."

Paul tells the Romans that when the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, that same Spirit gives life to your mortal body. Not future tense only — present tense. Right now. The landscape of your life may look devastated. Grief, addiction, failure, illness may have leveled everything visible. But the Spirit of the living God is not a surface dweller. He is the life buried deep in your foundation, pressing upward through every crack, refusing to let death have the final word.