12 Days of Healthy ChristmasSample

“From a Stump”

How many of us feel like a stump?

You know what I mean. You feel like you have just started to accomplish something and all the sudden, you are just stopped dead in your tracks. Some of us, as we have grown older, feel like we are simply that stump. We may look alive but in reality we are as dead as a tree stump. We have stopped believing in God for anything in this life. We may still cling to some sort of hope in the afterlife, but we are not even close to living the life Jesus promised us in the present.

Some of us are more like the program on television today called “The Walking Dead.” We are going through the motions of living, but the joy of living has long since departed.

I have some awesome news for you: Out of the stump will spring forth life.

As we work on our health journey, we are like a new branch that can spring forth from the old root. That was my story. While we are not Jesus and cannot be all that this incredible passage describes of Jesus, we certainly can have a restored life.

When I first purchased the home we used to have in Pasadena, a pastor friend of mine was working as a gardener on the side. He and his crew were our gardeners. He misunderstood some directions we gave him and instead of trimming back a very large fig tree, I came home to find a stump. We were so disappointed, but about 6 weeks later up from the side of the stump was a shoot. It grew.

Let’s become healthy and allow our lives to spring forth from the stump. This is why Jesus came to bring life. Let’s live it and see what beauty God can bring from what we may have felt was mundane, unproductive, and even dead.

Let’s live again this Christmas.

Health Tip: Healthy celebration promotes healthy growth.