Ken Fite

“Kenny! There’s a lizard in our bathroom!” aren’t exactly the words you expect to hear from your wife the moment that you get home from a long day at work… or ever, if I’m completely honest.

But that’s what Missy said to me as soon as I walked in the door a few days ago, telling me that a lizard, which happened to be albino – which somehow made it worse – appeared in our home.

We rushed upstairs, tripping on the toys our boys have scattered all over creation, and ran past our bedroom, armed with a dust pan, small broom, and Tupperware container, ready to catch the SOB.

There was only one problem. When we showed up, emboldened with our weapons of choice, ready to fight and capture the saboteur of our peace of mind, the little bugger was gone.

For the next several nights, Missy defiantly slept in our bedroom, adjacent to the bathroom door which she kept shut with towels shoved inside the crack to prevent our prisoner from escaping.

And I uncourageously slept on the couch downstairs, “gaining my strength” and preparing for the next showdown with the little albino wonder hiding somewhere above the room where I lay.

It’s not the first time we’ve been afraid as a couple. And it’s not the last time fear will show up.

That’s because life is crazy and we all struggle with fear in many different ways… in our jobs, in our relationships, with our health… fear likes to show up daily in many forms, shapes, and sizes.

But what we have to remember is that if we want to be people who are courageous, we have to embrace fear. Because courage doesn’t exist without fear. They’re two sides of the same coin.

They say that courage is doing the thing that you’re afraid to do. That it’s impossible to be courageous unless you’re scared. So when you find yourself scared, realize that you’re being given an opportunity to figure out how you can be courageous and do something about the fear.

What I’m finding is that you can short circuit fear when it shows up by following a simple plan:

1. Write down all of the things that could happen if the thing you’re afraid of comes true.
2. Circle the one thing that scares you the most.
3. Then list next to what you circled what you can do right now to prevent or prepare for it.

What you’ll find, I think, is that the worst-case scenario isn’t usually that bad and that by putting on paper your worst fear and what you can do right now to minimize it, you’ll feel better. Unless it’s the fear of having an albino lizard crawl on your face in the middle of the night. That one’s pretty bad.

By writing down the worst thing that can happen by whatever it is that fear is telling you, and listing out what you can do about it right now, you’ll find your courage. And you’ll be prepared for battle.

But if you want to be courageous, you have to act. Like last night when Missy came downstairs with a crazed but determined look in her eyes and calmly said to me, “He’s back. Get the broom.”

We were prepared. We had a plan. And when it came time to act, we were courageous.

You can be, too.

Remember that “courage doesn’t always roar,” as author Mary Anne Radmacher has written.

Sometimes it’s found in the in the quiet determination to stand up against fear.

Usually it’s found when we make a plan to conquer our fear.

But courage is always found when we decide to act. Not in spite of our fear, but because of it.

When I decided that I wanted to try to be a writer and find my voice, I knew that it would take a lot of practice. So starting a blog that I’d write weekly on Saturday mornings became a constant for me. No matter what kind of book I was writing the other days of the week, I knew that on Saturday mornings I’d be writing about my life experiences and the lessons that I learned the week before.

The purpose of this blog isn’t just to practice writing, but also to keep me accountable to paying closer attention to my life so I can find the lessons I’m supposed to learn and share with you here.

So around seven in the morning, whenever I hit publish and head upstairs to get ready for the day, Missy will often stop me to ask how my writing went. Usually I shrug my shoulders and say fine.

But often I’ll tell her that it sucked.

I know we’re often our own worst critics, but I hate publishing something that I feel isn’t perfect or the message isn’t clear or I didn’t take the right angle to capture the real story that I’m writing. Being on a self-imposed deadline of finishing by seven o’clock keeps me moving forward. If I feel like I’ve taken the wrong path that day or the wrong angle on the story, it’s too late to turn around.

But I show up anyway. I sit down in faith and I write whatever’s on my heart, whatever it is that I feel called to share with you. And whether I think it’s good or bad, I hit publish and I walk away.

I’ve noticed a funny thing happen whenever I tell Missy that my writing sucked that day. A few hours later, I’ll get an email from a reader who tells me how much they connected with the message… they felt like I wrote it just for them… and it helped with a trial they’re going through.

That’s when I scratch my head and try to figure out why what I consider to be my best writing isn’t always what resonates with readers… and what I’m embarrassed to have written impacts lives.

They say that if you want to find your voice in writing, you need to show up every day and write something. And you need to read. A lot. Because when you read and you find something that you wish you would have written yourself, you know you’re on the path to finding the writers that will influence your body of work and help shape you into the writer that you’re supposed to become.

My favorite book about writing is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I love the way that Lamott explained how to find the real story, the one you’re supposed to write. She says that good writing is looking for the kid standing up against the wall. The kid nobody notices. And that kid is who the real story is about. It’s waiting for the Polaroid to develop to see what shows up out of the dark, green murk.

For the longest time I thought that was advice on how to find your voice as a writer.

But now I realize that it’s about so much more than that. I think the real story is that finding your voice is really just the beginning. Because after you start to find your voice, you need to learn to trust your voice, too. That’s the real story here. That’s my kid standing up against the wall.

I’m finding that best way to learn how to trust your voice is to start by trusting yourself.

So write.

Trust your gut.

Say a little prayer, decide what you think the real story is, then start your work.

The only way to build self-trust is by being brave, so once you start, don’t turn back.

Don’t hold anything back, either. Because the words that you’re brave enough to share with the world just may be the very words that someone needs to read. Even if you thought they sucked.

I was listening to my pastor give a sermon on loving your enemies last Sunday. Funny how timely these kinds of messages can be sometimes. There are no coincidences, as they say.

He was explaining how our enemies are loved just as much as we are and then he asked us a question that really bothered me. “Would you be okay with it if your home in heaven ends up being next door to your biggest enemy?” he asked.

Hell no! I answered quickly in my head before looking around at the people sitting next to me, just to make sure I that hadn’t actually said what I was thinking out loud.

I wouldn’t want to ever see my biggest enemy ever again, let alone run into them as I walk down my driveway paved of gold to get the mail every day for the rest of eternity.

But the point that he was trying to make was that we’re called to love our enemies. And if I’m honest with you, I have a really hard time with that.

Our enemies seek to do us harm. We’re called to love them anyway.

Our enemies hate us and make our lives miserable. We’re called to do good to those who hate us.

Our enemies curse us and speak badly about us. We’re called to bless them in return.

And our enemies persecute us. We’re called to pray for them.

I’ve tried hating those who hate me. All it does is make things so much worse for everyone.

The truth is that loving our enemies doesn’t mean that we need to become best friends with them. It doesn’t mean that we start including them on our Evites for our barbecue get-togethers. And we don’t need to send them Christmas cards or call every now and then to see how they’re doing.

But it does mean forgiving them.

Because if our hearts are filled with hate, there will be little room left for us to love anyone else. And if we only love the people who are good to us and love us back, what kind of love is that?

That doesn’t mean you let people walk all over you. That doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for yourself. And that doesn’t mean you don’t play a part in setting things right when you need to.

But we do need to strive to forgive, no matter how difficult that may be or how long it may take.

Because forgiveness allows us to let go and move on. It lets us off the hook from having to get even with our enemies and it leaves justice to be served by a higher authority. It heals our hearts.

The best way to love our enemies is to forgive them. The best way to forgive is to pray for them.

This doesn’t mean that you dedicate time every night to pray that your biggest enemy gets a promotion, or a raise, or that the evil plans that they’ve made to harm you becomes a reality.

Just pray. Pray for the situation. Pray for them. Pray for yourself. What you’ll find is that prayer won’t always change your enemy. And it won’t change God. But prayer will always change you.

I ran into my friend Nick the other day. After asking how I was doing and telling him that I was fine, he paused and asked me again, not believing my first answer. “No Ken, how are you really doing?”

Only good friends can tell when you’re lying to them.

“Things could be better,” I said as I shared a few trials of life that I’ve been going through and telling Nick, a fellow Christian, how frustrated I was because I felt like I wasn’t hearing from God.

Nick’s response and boldness caught me off guard. “Don’t you read the word?” he asked. “Whenever I have time… which is mostly never,” I admitted. “Don’t you pray?” I thought about how to respond and decided to be truthful since Nick’s truth-dar seemed to be working pretty well. “Whenever I need something, I guess.” I realized that I was about to get schooled by my friend.

“Then the problem isn’t that you’re not hearing from God – you’re just not listening for him. There’s a difference between hearing and listening,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re not hearing from God.”

I agreed and changed the subject, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about our conversation.

He was right, after all.

There really is a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is passive and doesn’t always lead to understanding. But listening is intentional. It takes effort. And often, listening means trying to find the true meaning behind whatever it is that the other person is communicating to us. Maybe that’s why Nick asked me how I was doing twice. He was listening to me, not just hearing from me.

We all have the ability to listen…

When I ask my three-year-old if he’s poopy and he screams no and runs away from me, faster than the Flash racing Superman, I know that the real answer is yes because I’m listening.

And when my wife is cleaning the kitchen and I ask if she needs help and she shakes her head no while simultaneously giving me the stink-eye, I know what her real answer is, too.

So then, why is it so hard for us to hear from God?

I think the real meaning behind the words spoken by my friend is that God does speak to us, not only through His word and prayer, but also through promptings and our conversations with others.

That conversation with my friend ended up being an answered prayer. Now I realize that because I had been so focused on trying hear from God that I wasn’t intentionally trying to listen to Him.

As I said goodbye to my friend, he left me with one more thought which spoke deeply to me.

“Remember that God allows us to go through trials so we can learn a lesson and help others down the road who go through the same thing. Ken, learn the lesson. Then help others.” I hope I have.

A few days ago, I was reading an article in The New York Times on Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger. That makes me sound a lot more educated and sophisticated than I really am. In reality, I just accidentally clicked on the Times link that I saw in my Facebook feed instead of the video of a stray dog that hilariously interrupted a reporter’s live shot that I was really trying to watch.

Still, I was glad I clicked on the Charles Schwab article because it gave me a good reminder of what I think is probably the most important lesson in business and life that one can learn.

Bettinger recalled his college days and how proud he was of his 4.0 average through senior year.

He studied and prepared for the final exam for his business strategy class, one of the last courses that he had to take before graduating. Bettinger memorized all of the formulas that he’d have to use on the exam and was prepared when he walked into the room and sat down, waiting to begin.

When all of the students arrived, the professor started walking around the class, handing out the final exam. It was just a single piece of paper, which he said not to turn over until he said to.

After the professor finished placing an exam on every desk, he stood at the front of the class.

“Go ahead and turn it over,” he said.

What Bettinger and his fellow students found was that both sides were completely blank.

The students looked at each other, then back at the professor, searching for an explanation.

“I’ve taught you everything I can teach you about business over the last ten weeks,” the professor said, looking out at the faces of each of his students, all eager to use the head knowledge that they were ready to apply to the exam so they could graduate and start living their lives in the real world.

“But the most important message, the most important question is this,” the professor continued. “What’s the name of the lady who cleans this building?” he asked and then sat down.

Bettinger sat there, staring at the blank piece of paper as some students crumpled and threw their papers in the trashcan, and even fewer handed the professor their shot-in-the-dark answers.

He later learned that the cleaning lady’s name was Dottie. Bettinger, like most students, had never taken the time to meet and learn the name of the person who kept the building looking so good.

That was the only exam Bettinger ever failed. He got a B in the class and ruined his perfect 4.0.

But it was one of the most important lessons in business and life that he ever learned.

Names are so important, so much so that I even wrote a book about how to remember them. But we can’t remember the names of people that we don’t take the time to learn in the first place.

What I have to keep reminding myself is how important it is to build and grow relationships, even with people that you think will never be able to help you. Learning a name is a good place to start.

I’ll never forget my first job out of college. I was new to the company and happened to find myself in the elevator with the guy in charge of the entire office of a couple thousand employees.

“Good morning, Ken,” the head honcho said with a smile and after he stepped out onto his floor, I looked down at my badge that I was sure he had looked at to get my name. Only I wasn’t wearing one. I forgot that I had left it at home that day and was wearing a temporary badge. I was shocked that the most important man in the building would care to learn the name of the least important.

What Bettinger and I both learned is this – the most important lesson in business and life is to learn people’s names. It shows that you’re engaged. It shows that you care. And it’s good for your soul.

Don’t be so caught up in the importance of head knowledge that you lose sight of heart knowledge.

Dale Carnegie said it best when he wrote that, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Make it a point to find the Dotties in your life. Learn their names. Because relationships matter.

My favorite show of all time has got to be 24. I can still remember the first time I watched the show. It was 2001 and I was sitting in my apartment flipping through the channels when I happened to land on a show with a badass federal agent named Jack Bauer who was having one hell of a day.

Back then, having a TV show addiction was terrible. You couldn’t discover a new show on Netflix and binge-watch it all weekend long. No, in those days you had to wait each week for the next episode and deal with all of the commercial breaks during the show like a caveman.

What I didn’t know in 2001, I now understand a little bit better, as I’ve been studying the art of writing fiction and putting the finishing touches on my first thriller that I’m close to releasing.

The reason 24 was so addicting to me was because of the hero’s journey, a pattern identified by Joseph Campbell who said that every hero in virtually every story throughout history followed.

The hero starts out as an average person in their ordinary world. Then something happens and they’re given a call to action. They accept the challenge, face their fear, and in the process the hero dies a metaphorical death, only to be reborn in some way. The result is that in the end, the hero returns back to the ordinary world, transformed and not quite the same.

In 24, Jack’s daughter goes missing. Then his wife gets kidnapped. Before you know it, the Jack that we were introduced to in the first episode starts to completely change before our very eyes.

By the end of the first season (and every season after that) Jack becomes a very different person than who he was when the adventure started because of the challenges he faced and accepted.

That’s because when a hero accepts a challenge and sets out on a new adventure, the quest changes them. When they return home, they’re no longer the same person that they were before they left. They may be right back where they started, but now they’ve outgrown their old life.

Here’s what I’m starting to realize – that the adventures and misadventures of our own lives follow the very same pattern that we find in the hero’s journey.

The truth is, we’re not separate from the heroes that we watch in our shows or movies or read about in our favorite novels. Every one of us is living the same story as the heroes we admire.

We may not slay dragons or chase bad guys, but we have our own quests to go on that life likes to give us. But if we want to be transformed, we have to be willing to go through hell to get there.

In his book Deep Change, Robert Quinn says, “Change is hell. Yet not to change, to stay on the path of slow death, is also hell. The difference is that the hell of deep change is the hero’s journey. The journey puts us on a path of exhilaration, growth, and progress.”

If you’re going through a rough time in your life right now and are feeling defeated, realize that you’re not at the end of your story. You’re smack dab in the middle of it.

But this is the very moment where you need to accept the challenge, even if the change will be hell, so you can reinvent yourself and be transformed into a better version of yourself.

Will you answer the call to action? Are you ready to outgrow your old life and be forever changed?

If your world has been turned upside down, if you’re going through a rough time right now, understand that this is the beginning of a new adventure for you. But you have a decision to make.

Are you going to die a slow death of mediocrity? Or will you answer the call to action, accept the challenge, and die an intentional death so you can be reborn into a different season of your life?

Only you can answer that. And how you respond will either make you the hero or the antihero.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked my seven-year-old the other night as I tucked him in bed. “I want to be a writer. Like you,” he said and flashed me a funny toothless grin.

I smiled back and then said something I probably shouldn’t have, but did anyway. “But Daddy isn’t a writer. He’s a manager who happens to write.” I don’t know why I said that, but I did. And I saw Kyle’s smile disappear. “But I’m going to be just a writer. One day,” I said as he closed his eyes.

As he drifted off to sleep and I waited an extra minute or two for good measure so I could sneak out of his room without waking him up, I started thinking about why he looked so disappointed.

I think it’s because we tend to let our jobs define us. And it’s taught to us from an early age.

When kids are little, we ask them what they want to be when they grow up. And as adults, after asking someone for their name, the next question we like to ask is, “What do you do for a living?”

It’s an innocent enough question. We’re just looking for connection points so we can see if we have anything in common with the people that we meet so we can find something to talk about.

But the answer about what we do for a living usually comes with assumptions about the other person’s education, income, intelligence, and even the value that they bring to the world.

As I left Kyle’s room, a memory came back to me about a boss that I had ten years ago named Bill. He was the best manager that I ever had, someone that I looked up to and still try to be like today.

Bill was always in a good mood, even on the days when everything went wrong and he had every right to get upset. No matter what happened, he had a good attitude. One day I sat in his office and I asked him why he was always so positive when the job should have sent him to the loony bin.

“Because my job doesn’t define me,” he said.

His answer caught me off guard. How could his job not define him? He was a very senior leader. He was well-respected and got stuff done. He was one of the most intense managers I’ve ever worked with. If anyone’s job should have defined a man, it should have been his. But it didn’t.

When Bill saw that I was having a hard time processing what he was telling me, he explained.

“Look, I’m a husband. I’m a father. I’m a Believer. I’m a drummer at my church. This is just a job. Yes, I do my very best every day that I come into work. When I’m here, I push myself to be excellent in every way that I can. But at the end of the day, it’s just a job. It doesn’t define me.”

I think far too often we let the work we do and the job titles we so desperately seek after define us.

We chase money, even though we know deep down that money won’t lead to long-term happiness. And we put our entire identity and self-worth into a job which is a very risky thing to do.

Give your job your all. Crush it each and every single day. Do your best work. Leave your legacy.

But don’t put your entire identity and sense of self-worth into your job, because you are not your job. And you’re not defined by what you do. You’re only defined by one metric – who you are.

Take the time to redefine and reestablish who you are. When your job title is stripped away from you, what’s left? Who are you and what are you really meant to accomplish on this crazy planet?

Maybe the best thing you can do today is list a few passions and pursuits that are just as important to you as your job and people that really matter in your life and start focusing on those things.

And maybe the next time someone asks me what I do…

I’ll tell them I’m a writer who happens to be a manager.

I’ve been in the church for most of my life, so I must have heard the Parable of the Talents a million times by now. If it’s new to you, I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version of the story.

A master (who represents God) sets out on a long journey and puts three servants (who represent you and me) in charge of his estate of eight talents. A talent was a unit of measurement of about 80 pounds of silver or gold. Some think it may have been the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s currency – that’s a lot of Benjamins. So an estate of eight talents was kind of a big deal.

To one servant, the master gave five talents. To another, he gave two talents. And to the third, he gave one talent. Each of the men was given a talent according to their specific skills and ability.

Because even one talent would have been the equivalent of a million dollars, I can completely understand the third man’s decision on what he decided to do with the talent that he was given.

While the first man put his five talents to work and doubled his money, as did the second man who did the same, the third man was too worried about how to use the talent that he had been given.

So he decided to bury it in the ground where it would be safe.

The third man knew that if his talent was buried, it wouldn’t have the opportunity to multiply. But it also meant that he wouldn’t misuse what he was given, and that’s what mattered more to him.

When the master returned, he was pleased with the first two men.

They each doubled what they had been given and were invited to celebrate with the master. But the third man was called wicked and lazy for not even putting the talent in the bank to earn interest. I’m pretty sure I remember something about gnashing of teeth. It didn’t end well for that guy.

While the word talent refers to a large sum of money, I think talent really refers to the gifts that we’ve been given here on Earth. When I think about the parable, a few things jump out at me.

We’re not created equally.
When it comes to gifts, we’re not created equally. Some people have a gift of leadership while others are good worker bees. Some have a talent for speaking while others prefer to write. While we can feel sorry for the third man who was only given one talent compared to the other two men, we need to change our focus and stop comparing our abilities to other people’s. Because we’re not measured against what we’re given, we’re measured by what we do with what we’ve been given.

The master didn’t give specific instructions.
The master never really instructed the men to do anything specific with the talents that they were given. He didn’t tell them to go out and multiply their talents. But he also didn’t tell them to preserve their talents or warn the men not to lose what they were given. He just gave them the talents and stepped away to see what they would do with them. I think a lot of the time, we know what our unique gifts are, but we’re waiting around for specific instructions on how to use them. Maybe there are no instructions. Maybe the master is just waiting to see what we’re going to do with our talents.

You have a responsibility to do something with your talent.
Recognizing that you have a talent isn’t enough, you have a responsibility to do something with it. Using your talent may feel risky, but a life without risk isn’t much of a life at all. If you’ve decided to bury your talent, you’re not only robbing yourself of doing what you may have been called to do, but you’re also robbing the world of the blessings that your gifts would have given them, too.

For far too long, I’ve been the third man. I’ve looked at what others have and wished many times that I was them. And because I didn’t have their gifts, I decided to dismiss and bury my own.

But we’ve all been given exactly what we need to follow our calling. We’re not created equally when it comes to gifts and talents, and that’s a good thing. We need to realize that there are no instructions. It’s up to us to discover our talents and use them for good. When we get nervous about doubling down and using our talents, we need to remember that obedience bears fruit.

There are lots of people who will tell us what we’re supposed to do and who we’re supposed to be.

If you let them, they can talk you into doing just about anything other than the very thing that you were meant to do. The challenge is discovering what that purpose is and doing something about it.

You were created for a purpose. It’s time to dig up your talent and find the courage to act on it.

I’ve been waiting on God to answer a prayer of mine for a long time. He hasn’t yet. And the waiting can be enough to drive anyone mad. On my way out of the house the other day, I ruffled my boys’ hair and kissed Missy goodbye. She stopped me at the door and said, “How you wait matters.”

“What?” I asked, a little confused. “How you wait matters,” she said again. I just nodded and left.

She’s right, I thought as I drove off. It’s just so easy to get discouraged when you have to wait a long time to see a promise in your heart come to pass. You start to feel completely helpless.

It can take a ridiculous amount of time for something we’re waiting on to become a reality. In the process, we can become bitter or we can become better, depending on how we handle the waiting.

And if I’m honest with myself, I start to become bitter. But if I listen to the wisdom of my wife (as we all should!) there might be something there. Here’s a few reasons why Missy just might be right:

1. When we’re forced to wait, it reveals our motives. Waiting forces us to slow down and think through our true intentions. It reveals why we want something to come to pass. If we’re honest enough to examine our true motives, we can better understand if what we’re hoping for is really going to be what’s best for us in the end. Sometimes it won’t be.
2. The longer we wait, the more we appreciate. We don’t value things that are just handed to us with little work. They quickly lose their shine. But the longer we wait in faith that we’re going to see our breakthrough, the more we appreciate it when our hope becomes reality.
3. Waiting builds our character. I know, nobody likes this one. We all hate the “it’s building your character” spiel. If you want to annoy someone, tell them not to worry when they have a problem. Say that it’s building their character and slap them on the back. They’ll love that. But the truth is that spiritual growth happens only when we’re completely dependent on God and one of the best tools He has is for us to depend on Him for a promise to come to pass.

Here’s the deal. Whatever you’re going through right now probably won’t matter that much a few years down the road. But how you handle the time that you spend waiting will absolutely matter.

Who we become while we wait just might be the best part of waiting. In Romans it says that hope that is seen is not hope. If you have hope for something, you are waiting. It’s in the waiting that we have the opportunity to become transformed and how we wait can change us from the inside out.

Yes, it will teach us patience (sorry). Yes, it will help us appreciate things. But it will CHANGE who we are, CHANGE how we handle the next challenge, and CHANGE our relationship with God.

Maybe that’s the point.

Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards. If you’ve been waiting for a prayer to be answered, take some time to look back on your life at similar situations that you’ve been through. Remember how you felt while you were in the messy middle and realize that how you wait matters. It just might be the most important part. And know that His blessings are always worth waiting for.

I wouldn’t consider myself to be a “tree guy.” I’m not even sure if that’s a thing. But, I happened to be reading an article on sequoias that caught my eye while scrolling my Facebook news feed the other night and I learned a few interesting things about these trees that I thought I would share.

If you’re not up to date on your sequoias, let me catch you up.

Sequoias are often referred to as nature’s skyscrapers. If you’ve never seen a sequoia, Google it. They’re big. Really big. Sequoias can grow to over 30 feet in diameter and 250 feet tall. In the United States, they’re found in northern California and can live to be over 3,000 years old.

While going down the mighty sequoia rabbit hole, a.k.a. wasting time while my boys took a bubble bath, I noticed two lessons about the trials of life that we could learn from these amazing trees.

Don’t just grow deeper, grow wider.

We’re often told when we go through the storms of life that we need deep roots. That may be true. But, the sequoia doesn’t have deep roots. Instead, these mighty trees become so mighty because while most roots grow deep, their roots grow wide. One of the secrets of the sequoia is that if the tree is to have a chance in reaching its full potential and weathering the storms that come its way, it can’t grow alone. If a sequoia grows by itself, it will topple over. It doesn’t stand a chance.

But, when sequoias grow with other sequoias, something amazing happens just below the surface – their roots that grow wide will reach out and look for the roots of other nearby sequoias. And when it finds another sequoia’s roots, they begin to intertwine and interlock, making them stronger than they would have been by themselves and allowing them to grow taller than any other tree.

If we want to weather the storms of life, we must be intentional with creating relationships with others. Establish deep roots, know who you are, but if we want to stand tall we must go wide.

The fires of life are required for future growth.

As the evening wore on and I dove deeper into my reading of dendrology (the study of trees – you’re welcome), I discovered another secret of how the sequoia grows so large and lives so long. The tree’s bark is fire-resistant and protects the trees from the inevitable fires of life. Because these trees live so long, at some point, lightening will strike and cause a fire in a sequoia grove. But, because the tree’s bark contains tannic acid, the same stuff used in fire extinguishers, it protects the tree from burning up when the flames come into contact with the trunks of these trees.

While the tree has a way to protect itself from being consumed by fire, it still needs a way to create life. The cones that fall to the ground don’t open on their own, they must be dried out. For years, people tried to prevent fires until they realized that they were actually preventing new sequoias from growing. That’s because fire is one of the only things that will dry up the cones and allow the seeds to germinate. While a grown sequoia is protected from the flames by its bark, fire is a necessity for the tree to be able to give life to something new. It clears the underbrush, allowing more sunlight to reach the ground, and the ashes make good fertilizer for new sequoias to grow.

While we like to avoid the fires in our lives, because trials aren’t comfortable, we need to hold onto the things that will protect us and keep us from being consumed by the fire. And we need to realize that the fires we endure are often the very thing we need in order to give life to something new.