The Vineyard on Rattlesnake Hill

In 2017, wildfires swept through Sonoma County, California, and scorched thousands of acres of premium vineyard land. Among them was a small family operation on Rattlesnake Hill that the Martinelli family had tended for four generations. The old-vine Zinfandel — some plants over a hundred years old, with root systems reaching thirty feet deep — stood blackened and skeletal against the smoky sky. Roberto Martinelli walked the charred rows and wept. Everything his great-grandfather had transplanted from Italian rootstock, everything the family had pruned and watered and coaxed through decades of drought and frost, looked finished.

But Roberto did something that surprised his neighbors. He did not bulldoze. He waited. He knelt beside the ruined vines and prayed for what he could not see — the roots beneath the ash. And the following spring, tiny green shoots broke through the blackened bark. The roots had held.

The psalmist knew this ache. God had transplanted a vine out of Egypt, cleared the ground, and watched it flourish until its branches stretched from sea to sea. Then the walls came down. The boars moved in. The vine was cut and burned. And yet the psalmist does not demand a new vine. He pleads, "Turn again, O God of Hosts. Look down from heaven and see. Tend this vine."

Sometimes the most faith-filled prayer is not for something new, but for the Almighty to restore what He already planted — because the roots still hold.