The Two Oak Trees on Maple Street

In 2019, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina planted two identical red oak saplings along Maple Street, just three blocks apart. Same species, same nursery, same planting day. But one was set in the median strip — surrounded by concrete, dependent entirely on city irrigation schedules. The other was planted near a creek bed behind Calvary Baptist Church, its roots free to reach toward underground water.

Five years later, the difference is staggering. The median oak is stunted and brittle, its leaves curling brown by mid-July every summer. When the city forgot to run the irrigation trucks during a budget dispute in 2022, it nearly died. The creekside oak stands twenty feet tall, its canopy wide and generous, offering shade to the church's outdoor lunch ministry. During that same drought, its leaves stayed green. Its roots had found what they needed long before the dry season came.

Jeremiah saw this Christ-followers would understand instinctively. The prophet declares that those who trust in human strength become like a shrub in the wasteland — exposed and desperate when the heat arrives. But those who trust in the Lord are like trees planted by water, sending roots toward the stream, unafraid when drought comes.

The question Jeremiah presses is not whether dry seasons will arrive. They always do. The question is where your roots are reaching right now, in this ordinary season — toward the shifting promises of human self-sufficiency, or toward the Living Water who never runs dry.