EMB EP 65 | Dormancy Is Not Death (Part 2)

If you've driven through the South, you know the image… entire treelines swallowed whole, every individual form buried under a mass of relentless green. That's kudzu. And I think most of us have some version of it growing in the interior landscape of our lives.

Here's the part that I couldn't shake when I started researching this: kudzu wasn't snuck in. It was invited. Celebrated, actually. The U.S. government paid farmers to plant it in the 1930s because it looked like a solution to a real problem. By the 1950s it was classified as a weed. By the 1970s, a federal pest. What was subsidized and welcomed became what devoured the landscape.

That's the episode. Because the things that do the most damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious rebellion, they're the things we welcomed in because they looked like solutions. The coping mechanism that made total sense in the season we adopted it. The way of thinking about ourselves that started as protection and became a prison.

And here's the harder truth I had to say out loud first. You can deal with the vine all day long. Cut it, name it, make a commitment. But if you don't deal with the root, it simply waits and resends. The kudzu root goes seven feet deep and weighs four hundred pounds. The vine is just evidence. The root is the conversation.

This one's a little uncomfortable. But I think it's the kind of uncomfortable that's actually really good for us.

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Shannon Scott (00:33)
Hey, hey, hey everybody and welcome back to the Everything Made Beautiful podcast. I hope that you enjoyed this last episode that we did starting this three part mini series called dormancy is not death. I'm enjoying it. I've had this stirring in my heart for a long time and I have been genuinely excited about this one today ⁓ because this is something that I have been so familiar with all of my life.

and I have not ⁓ known as much as I do now about it and the spiritual applications are beyond insane. So I'm super pumped that we get to do this together. If you missed episode one, I want to encourage you to go back and listen, not because you'll be lost without it or anything, but because it really sets up a contrast that I think is going to land differently once we're done today. So episode one was about Spanish moss.

and the way it drapes over the southern trees. What's assumed about that has been incorrect and what's actually true about it and its utter dependency on the tree it's on in so many ways was, well, it was tender for me and it was about hidden life and dormant seasons and a posture of receiving rather than striving. But today is a little different conversation and it's the same southern landscape, but it is a different

plant entirely and honestly researching this made me a little bit uncomfortable with how it applies and if you've ever driven through the south and I mean really driven through it usually past the highway exits and into the back roads you know the image I'm about to describe. There are entire tree lines that are absolutely swallowed whole. I mean literally the trees are turned into green sculptures.

every individual form, the oak, the pine, whatever was there before is completely erased by one thing covering everything. You can't see the shape of the tree anymore. You just see the mass of green that's blanketing whatever used to be there. And I am talking about kudzu.

Now, kudzu is a woody perennial vine. It's in the legume family, which I did not know, which is the same family as beans and peas. It's native to China and Japan, where it has been used medicinally for over 2,000 years. That's important. And where insects, fungal diseases, and grazing animals that evolved alongside it kept it in check naturally. So the animals got created for China and Japan.

and this same perennial vine were all there together and those animals, the insects and the diseases even and the grazing animals, they kept kudzu in check. But in the American South, none of those controls exist. So kudzu grows up to a foot per day in summer. Think about that.

Every day in the summer, kudzu is growing one foot. And we don't even notice that that much growth is happening. That is 60 feet per season. In fact, kudzu is one of the fastest growing plants documented in North America. And unlike Spanish moss, which remember, takes nothing from what it rests on, kudzu kills by smothering. It blankets everything so completely that sunlight

cannot reach the leaves of the host tree. It adds weight, thousands of pounds of vine on a single tree until the branches break and the whole structure collapses. It doesn't just cover what it climbs. It erases the shape of what's underneath. Now, here is the part that is crazy. Kudzu was not snuck in.

and it didn't accidentally attach itself to something and hitchhike to America. It was invited. Listen to this origin story. Kudzu actually came to the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and it was brought over as an ornamental plant. I mean, it's beautiful, it's fast growing, and it seems like a wonderful addition. Then, in the 1930s,

The U.S. Soil Conservation Service began actively promoting it across the South as a solution to erosion. They paid farmers to plant it. They distributed over 85 million seedlings. There were literally kudzu clubs. There were promotional campaigns. It was celebrated, named, and handed out like a gift because it genuinely seemed like it was going to fix something.

But by 1953, about 20 years later, it was classified as a weed. And by the 1970s, 20 years after that, it was classified as a federal noxious pest. Okay, I want you to hear this. What was planted as a solution became the problem. So what was subsidized and celebrated became what devoured the landscape.

Okay, here's where it stops being just a botany lesson. Proverbs 14-12 says, there is a way that appears to be right, but in the end, it leads to death. So the things that do the most lasting damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious, eyes wide open rebellion. I mean, the things that we did that we knew were wrong are things we're not confused about, right?

We can point to those moments and name them clearly. So that's not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about the things we welcomed in because they looked or seemed like solutions. Think about that coping mechanism you picked up during a genuinely hard season that made total sense at the time, but then became your default setting long after the crisis passed.

The way that you learned to manage people so they couldn't hurt you, but you've been calling it wisdom for all these years. That thing you turn to when you're overwhelmed or lonely or afraid that started as relief and has quietly become a requirement. Or the agreement that you made about yourself in a painful season. I have to earn, I have to perform, I have to be useful or I won't be wanted. I can relate to that.

But those are the things that we dress up in spiritual language and let take up permanent resonance in us. And just like kudzu, we didn't sneak these things in through the back door. We walked them through the front door. Some of us enabled them for years. Some of us built entire structures of our lives around them because they were holding something up or seemed to be. And then one day we couldn't see the of ourselves underneath anymore.

Here's what kudzu does that is so precise as a picture. It doesn't kill immediately. That's actually the insidious part. The tree is still alive under there for a while. It's still standing. It's just completely covered. The original form is obscured and then eventually the weight becomes too much and everything collapses. I have watched this happen in real people's lives.

I have felt the possibilities of it in my own. Maybe you have too. Maybe you're watching it happen in your own right now, or maybe you're watching it happen to someone that you love. The person is still there. The original design is still underneath, but they've been covered for so long by performance or by striving or by a particular way of managing fear or pain or the need for approval that they've genuinely forgotten their own shape.

and the people around them have stopped being able to see it too. This is not condemnation by the way, this is just truly a description. And I want to say, I am not standing at a distance from this. I have had kudzu in my own interior landscape, patterns I welcomed in during hard seasons that I later had to reckon with honestly, ways of operating that looked a lot like strength from the outside and were

quietly collapsing something on the inside. So I'm not pointing at you. I am sitting next to you. But here's where I need to say the hard thing and I want to say it with all the love that I hope you know I have. You can deal with the vine all day long. You can cut it. You can name it in a prayer meeting. You can make a commitment. You can white knuckle your way through accountability. And if that's all you do,

The root simply waits and then this is the literal biological term, it resends. Because the kudzu root goes seven feet deep and can weigh 400 pounds. The root. Everything you see above the ground is just evidence of what's happening below it. Remember what scripture says? Out of the heart the mouth speaks or in Matthew 15, 19.

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. The vine is just evidence. The root is the real conversation we have to have. And kudzu is one of the most honest pictures of surface level behavior change without inner transformation that I've ever seen, certainly in a plant, but kind of ever. People cut it back all the time.

You should see the kudzu removal process in the South. I remember this growing up in Georgia and it comes back and it comes back fast. And I think the church can sometimes leave people discouraged in this area. And I don't mean your church or my church. I just mean the church as a concept, the gathering of God's people.

We can sometimes leave people discouraged in this way because maybe somebody comes forward at the end of a service or makes a commitment or goes to a conference and then six months later they find themselves right back where they started. And I think that's because we spend so much time dealing with the vine, but we never get honest about the root. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not offer us just better vine management. It offers us a new heart.

Ezekiel 36 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. That is a root level offer. That is not a vine trim. That is a new heart. I have to tell you one more thing about kudzu eradication because the more I studied it the more passionate I got about this for our lives and I think this might actually be the most important part of this entire episode.

It takes 10 years of consistent, sustained treatment to fully eradicate an established strand of kudzu. 10 years. And that's if you're consistent. You cannot just do it one season. You cannot do it in a weekend intensive. You cut it, it comes back. You spray it, the root waits. You have to show up consistently, season after season, doing the very

if you'll allow me, unsexy work of maintenance until the root finally stops having the resources to rescind. I am not saying this to discourage us, but I'm saying it because we've not always been honest about this as believers, I don't think, and I think that has hurt people.

people who had a real encounter, a real turning point, a real moment of grace, and then found the old roots rescinding a few months later and concluded that something must be wrong with them, that maybe the grace didn't take or that they're too far gone or that God has given up. But we are an instant gratification culture and that doesn't stop at our healing.

We want to be broken and then all the way healed after a really good cry and some rededication of our lives, but that is not how eradication or true healing work. Everything is much slower than that. Faster doesn't equal better. Genuine transformation, the kind that goes all the way down to the root, is the work of a lifetime. It is sustained, consistent, sometimes boring, often discouraging, but absolutely worth it.

That's not a lesser version of sanctification. It's what sanctification actually looks like. Romans 5, 3 and 4 says, we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character, hope. Perseverance, not a moment, not a breakthrough, perseverance.

You know, I told you last episode that Spanish moss carries hidden compounds that changed the course of medicine. Well, kudzu has a little surprise of its own. This is almost a little too theologically on the nose for me to sit with very comfortably, but I'll just give it to you and we'll let it do what it does. Kudzu root contains compounds that have been studied in peer-reviewed research for reducing alcohol cravings and compulsive behavior.

Harvard Medical School has published on this, the plant that devours the southern landscape, that smothers and collapses everything it climbs, carries inside itself, something that addresses one of humanity's oldest and most persistent compulsions. Okay, I'm not gonna over theologize, maybe that's the word. I'm not gonna over theologize that. But I will say this, redemption narratives in scripture

often look exactly like this. God working through the very thing not around it. You've heard a lot of people say the only way out is through so the thing that destroys also somehow is becoming part of the story of healing. It's not a clean metaphor perfectly and it's not meant to be but it is a very very old pattern in how God often works.

So before we go, I want to leave you with a few honest questions this week. Maybe you are in a currently dormant season and you're wondering what it could be for or what you should be doing in a dormant season that maybe you've decided was dead but isn't. Well, these aren't as a guilt exercise, but they are a real invitation to look at your own interior landscape and in the dormant seasons of our lives.

looking interior, looking inward, that is often such a wise next step for us. So here's a few questions. What did you invite in because it looked like a solution? What started as a coping mechanism, a protection strategy, a reasonable response to a hard season? What is that thing that has now been growing long past its expiration date?

Secondly, what might be covering the original shape of who you are? Not who you perform to be, but who you actually are, the person God designed before the world told you who you had to become.

And in the answers to those questions, are you dealing with the vine or are you willing to have a conversation about the root? Because the tree is still underneath. Your original design is still there. The God who offers a new heart is not impressed by vine management and he's not satisfied by anything less than getting all the way down to where the real work is. Remember, he's the vine.

that we're supposed to be connected to. Like, he is the true vine, scripture says. Us dealing with just the vines of the unhealthy or dysfunctional or coping things in our lives is not gonna get at it. We've got to pull it out by the root. Remember, he is always making something beautiful.

even out of landscape that we should never have invited in. So don't hear shame, don't hear condemnation. But as you think about last week with Spanish Moss and you think about this week with Kudzu, we've got two very different creations doing some really specific things. I'm really grateful that you were here today because this one took some courage to sit through and I don't take that lightly that you stayed.

So if it stirred something real in you, don't let that go. Talk to someone, get help, do the work. You are worth the 10 years that it takes. Come back next week for the final episode in this series, and I promise it'll be a good one. We're gonna hold both of these plants in the same hand and talk about what it actually looks like to tend the interior life. I hope to see you then.