Grass or Cedar?

Two Kinds of Growth

Every spring, the hills around here turn green almost overnight. Rain hits, and for a few weeks it looks like something out of a postcard. Then summer comes, and just as fast, it's all brown again. If you've lived in California for more than a year, you've seen this happen so many times you probably don't think about it anymore.

Psalm 92 does think about it. (Read the full Psalm 92 chapter here.)

The psalm is a song written for the Sabbath, and it opens with something worth noticing:

It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praise to your name, Most High, to declare your faithful love in the morning and your faithfulness at night. (Psalm 92:1-2, CSB)

It's good to praise God, not because life worked out a certain way, but because he is faithful. In between the opening and closing of this psalm, it draws a picture using two kinds of growth.

Grass That Doesn't Last

Though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be eternally destroyed. (Psalm 92:7, CSB)

Grass comes up everywhere, fast and green, and just as quickly it's gone. Shallow roots, nothing built to last. The psalm says the wicked flourish the same way, quick and showy, but in the end they're destroyed for good.

Not long ago I had an experience that got me thinking about how common this is in a lot of people's lives. I overheard part of a phone call while I was out and about, someone clearly frustrated, arguing with what sounded like an ex about their kid, but it was difficult to hear, so I just prayed silently for them as my heart ached. I don't know their story, and it isn't my place to guess at it. It reminded me of a common pattern. Two people meet, there's an instant fire, and it feels like the most alive either of them has ever been. This is the one, they think. Then it burns out, and the person they'd have taken a bullet for becomes the person they loathe the most.

That's not just a story about relationships. The same instinct shows up in how a lot of people, especially younger folks right now, think about their whole future. A stable home, a lasting marriage, even retirement, can feel like things earlier generations got to have and they won't. So the temptation is to grab for it now: a get rich quick scheme, moving in together to test things out, credit card debt to keep up and enjoy life like everyone else seems to be enjoying it. Underneath these is the same lie, that God's boundaries mean he's keeping you from really living. It's backwards. The indulgence is what burns fast. The waiting is what lasts.

The Cedar

The righteous thrive like a palm tree and grow like a cedar tree in Lebanon. (Psalm 92:12, CSB)

Cedars in Lebanon take decades to reach anything like their full size. Nobody's impressed by a cedar sapling. It grows slow on purpose, and it's still standing long after the grass around it has come and gone three or four times over.

I was asked to speak at a tech conference for the University of California system, and I admitted something that sounds unproductive on paper: I spend the first hour of most days doing work with no visible output. Not grinding toward a deadline, just learning how things actually work before that knowledge is needed.

Picture a room with a hundred buttons in front of me, one that saves the day and twenty that wreck everything. When something breaks and I walk in and pick the right one in the first few tries, people are amazed. What they don't see is the hour a day that already narrowed it down before I ever had to choose.

Now apply that to the questions and decisions in life. Everyone today is pressing buttons, trying to figure out what they think is right, good, or useful. I don't want to spend my life in trial and error, hoping I land on the right one. I want to spend it upfront getting to know the one who already knows which ones to push and which to avoid, because he's the Author and Giver of life himself, the one who built the whole thing in the first place. That's not a call to try harder or earn something. It's an invitation to know him now, so I'm not left guessing later.

Planted in His House

Planted in the house of the LORD, they thrive in the courts of our God. (Psalm 92:13, CSB)

The psalm gets specific about where this kind of growth happens. Growth like this was never self generated. Trees don't try harder than grass. They're rooted somewhere grass's shallow roots never reach. Being planted in God's care means trusting him with more than just today. It means trusting him with the years still ahead too, the ones you're anxious about. The answer to that anxiety was never to hustle faster. It's to plant deeper.

Fruit in Old Age

They will still bear fruit in old age, healthy and green (Psalm 92:14, CSB)

There's a man in Joshua 14 who lived this out. Caleb was eighty five years old, and instead of asking for a quiet retirement, he asked for the hardest ground left to take, land still guarded by people who had terrified an entire generation forty five years earlier. He wasn't shopping for a rocking chair. He was still asking for a fight. And notice how he leads: "the LORD has kept me alive... as he promised." Not a resume of everything he'd earned by staying faithful. Just a plain acknowledgment of whose faithfulness had carried him there.

That's this whole psalm in one man. The fruit was never the point. It exists to point back to who kept him alive to bear it.

The Takeaway

So here's where that leaves the rest of us. This isn't a psalm about doing the right things so you can flourish. If it were, it would end with a formula. Instead it ends the same way it started:

The LORD is just; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him. (Psalm 92:15, CSB)

Whatever growth shows up in your life, slow or fast, visible or invisible, isn't proof of what you built. It's evidence of who has been faithful to you the whole time.

This week, try naming one place where growth in your life has felt slow, or stalled, or invisible. Then do what this psalm does. Turn it into praise, not because things worked out the way you wanted, but because he has been faithful in it anyway.

Scripture quotations from the Christian Standard Bible (CSB).