The Roots We Cannot See

On judging what we cannot see, and being seen all the way down to the root

Dear friend at forest’s edge,

A few weeks ago, another homeschool mother asked me a question. What do your children do all summer? How do they handle having no structure? It was an ordinary question, the kind people ask while standing in church hallways or lingering by folding tables after a Bible study. Not unkind, just pointed, just curious.

And because I was caught off guard, I answered quickly. “Oh, they spend a lot more time outside. They play and explore in the woods.” The conversation moved on. She nodded. We talked about something else.

But I didn’t move on. Not really. Because the question stayed with me. Not because it was unkind, but because my answer wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t the whole truth. I didn’t realize that until I was driving home, feeling that small ache you get when you’ve said something accurate but somehow not full.

Then, the very next day, a different friend asked me something entirely different. She asked if we plan to homeschool all the way through high school. When I said yes, she smiled, relieved almost, and told me she was glad we still took summers off, because she worried that families who pushed through the whole year were robbing their kids of the chance to simply be children.

Two conversations, one day apart. Two women, both kind, both sincere. One worried we might not have enough structure. The other worried some families had too much. Both were looking at the shape of a life from the outside, and both were seeing something completely different.

I sat with that for a long time, not because either woman had done anything wrong, but because I realized this happens to all of us, constantly, in every direction. We are forever being measured by people who can only see a sliver of the picture. And here’s the part that took longer to admit… we are forever doing the same thing to everyone else.

Not by appearance, but by the heart

There’s a passage many of us know by heart, though maybe we’ve only ever applied it to one narrow situation. When the prophet Samuel is sent to anoint the next king of Israel, he goes to the house of a man named Jesse, who has eight sons. God has told Samuel one of these sons will be king, but not which one. So Samuel does what any of us would do. He looks at the oldest son, Eliab, tall, strong, every inch the picture of a king, and thinks, surely this is the one.

But God stops him cold. “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

We usually hear that verse and think it’s about beauty… don’t judge a person by their looks, don’t be shallow. And it is that. But I think it goes much further. The Hebrew word translated “heart” is lev. In our language, heart mostly means feelings, the emotional part of a person. But in Hebrew, lev is bigger than that. It’s the control center of the whole person, the place where will and motive and memory and conviction all live together. It’s not just what someone feels. It’s who someone actually is, underneath everything visible.

So when God says He’s looking at the lev, He’s not saying, “I care more about your feelings than your face.” He’s saying, “I see the whole interior architecture of who you are, the parts no one has ever seen.”

Samuel saw seven sons before he ever got to David, the youngest, the one nobody had even bothered to call in from the fields. Seven times Samuel looked at the outside and thought, this one. And seven times he was wrong, because he was only using the tool he had (his eyes) to evaluate something his eyes were never equipped to measure.

Sifted, sorted, and the log in our own eye

There’s a second word worth holding onto here, this time from the Greek, krino. It’s the word usually translated “judge,” and it’s where we get words like critic and criticize. Originally it meant to separate, to sift, to sort one thing from another.

Jesus uses this word in Matthew 7. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” And almost in the same breath, He says, “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” I used to read that as two separate warnings. Now I think it’s one. Sifting, sorting, deciding what someone is based on what little we can see, requires a kind of clear sight none of us actually possess. We’re all looking through something, a log, Jesus says, something large enough to distort everything we think we’re seeing clearly.

God doesn’t have a log in His eye. He looks at the lev. We look at leaves.

The elephant, the raccoon, and the hollow tree

There’s a fable told in many cultures, in many forms, for a very long time, about a group of blind men who come across an elephant for the first time. One touches the trunk and announces this creature is like a great snake. Another reaches the leg and insists it’s a kind of tree, thick and rough. A third feels the ear and says it’s more like a fan, broad and flat. A fourth touches the tusk and calls it a spear. A fifth, the side, and calls it a wall.

Each man argues passionately. Each is correct about the small portion he’s touching, and each is certain about the whole animal, which none of them can perceive. What strikes me about that story isn’t that the men are foolish. It’s that they’re not. Each one is doing exactly what a careful, honest person does, drawing conclusions from the evidence in front of them. The problem isn’t dishonesty. The problem is scale. They’ve each touched something true and mistaken it for something total.

I thought about that story for an unexpected reason this summer, because of an actual hollow tree. We had a few trees taken down on our property, and when one came down, we found a hollow space inside the trunk. Tucked inside it, two baby raccoons, tiny eyes barely open, completely unaware that the whole world around them had just been picked up and laid on its side.

We didn’t know what else to do, so we did the only kind thing we could think of. We packed leaves in gently around them, like a little nest, and we backed away and left them alone, hoping their mother would find them before anything else did.

By morning, they were gone. At some point in the night, while we were asleep, their mother had come back. We don’t know exactly how, whether she carried them one at a time, whether it took her one trip or five, whether she was frantic or calm. We weren’t there for any of it. All we know is that she came, and she did what mothers do. By the time we woke up, both babies were safely relocated somewhere we’ll probably never find.

Here’s what we actually saw, if you’re keeping score: a fallen tree, a hollow, two helpless animals. That’s the whole visible story.

Here’s what we didn’t see: a mother moving through the dark, doing exhausting, careful, repeated work for hours, maybe with no audience, no acknowledgment, completely unseen by the family who’d disrupted her home in the first place.

We saw a hollow tree. We never saw the mother. I think that’s true of more lives than raccoons.

The woman at the well

There’s a woman in the Gospel of John who knows exactly what it feels like to be reduced to the part of her story that other people could see. She comes to a well at noon, not the cool of the morning when the other women of the town would gather, but the heat of midday, when she’d be alone. Most scholars think that’s not an accident. A woman with her history would have learned the hard way what time to come and go, because everyone in that town had an opinion about her. Five husbands, and now a man she wasn’t married to. They knew her, or thought they did. They’d sorted her, filed her away under a category, and probably stopped wondering anything else about her for years.

Then Jesus sits down at that well in the heat of the day and asks her for a drink. And over the course of one conversation, He does something no one in the town had apparently bothered to do. He sees all of her. Not just the five marriages, though He knows about those too. He sees her thirst, her isolation, her theology. She asks Him real questions about worship and the Messiah, and He answers her as an equal, the way a rabbi would answer a student. He sees a woman capable of carrying news of the Messiah back to an entire town, which is exactly what she does moments later, leaving her water jar behind because she’s suddenly carrying something heavier and better.

The town saw five husbands. Jesus saw a missionary. The town saw a hollow tree. He saw what the mother had been doing in the dark the whole time.

This season of the podcast takes its name from her. The woman at the well, at the edge, at the in between hour, when she thought no one was watching. Because I think most of us have a noon at the well version of ourselves. The part we’ve learned to manage, to explain quickly, to soften before anyone can sort us into the wrong category. Oh, they just play outside. Oh, it’s fine. Oh, we’re managing.

And most of us have also been the town. We’ve looked at someone’s five husbands, their messy house, their unconventional choices, their sweet seasons, and quietly decided we knew the whole story. The well is where both of those things get healed at once, where we’re finally seen all the way down to the lev, and where, if we let it, we start to see other people that way too.

What my children actually do all summer

So, back to the original question. What do my children do all summer, if not curriculum pages?

This week alone, my boys have been out back with power tools, working on a building project they designed and are building themselves. No instructions, no kit, just an idea, some scrap lumber, and a lot of trial and error. They’ve also been moving old logs into our raised garden bed so my oldest can split wood for kindling. That’s not a lesson plan. That’s just Tuesday.

My daughter has been doing what I can only describe as chicken triage. One of our baby hens got pecked by the flock and is recovering in the house right now, and my daughter is the one checking on her, feeding her, making sure she’s warm and safe, without being asked, every few hours, because she decided this baby chick was hers to care for.

My son with drum lessons doesn’t just go to his weekly lesson and stop there. He’s down in that room practicing multiple times a day, not because anyone’s making him, but because he genuinely loves it. Nobody had to write that on a chart.

We paint most days. We go to the library constantly, because every one of my children loves books, even the youngest ones who can’t read fluently yet but will sit through an entire chapter if I’m the one reading it out loud. Many days we’ve been making our way through The Return of the King. We’re nearly at the end now, and a few nights ago we hit a line that stopped all of us. It’s almost a throwaway sentence in the middle of a much bigger scene, something to the effect that the hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so the rightful king will be known.

We had to stop and sit with that one for a while. What an extraordinary way to identify a king. Not by a crown, not by armor or an army or how someone looks seated on a throne, but by hands, by what someone does quietly for the wounded, when there’s no audience, no ceremony, nothing to be gained.

If a stranger walked through our yard on a random Tuesday this summer, here’s what they’d see. A couple of boys with power tools, a half finished structure, a girl holding a sick chicken, a mother reading a thick paperback out loud to children who are half listening, half drawing in the dirt with sticks. They might think that looks unstructured.

What they wouldn’t see is a boy learning patience and how wood grain runs and what it feels like to finish something he designed himself. A girl learning what it costs to tend something weaker than her, day after day, with no guarantee it lives. A whole family together, discovering out loud what makes someone worth following. Hands like a healer’s, not a king’s, the way the world usually means it.

They’d see the hollow tree. They wouldn’t see the mother raccoon working in the dark. And if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have seen her work either, if we hadn’t happened to find an empty nest the next morning. Most of the time, we don’t even get that confirmation. Most of the time, the mother does her work, and we never find out at all. We just assume the hollow tree is empty.

What I fail to see in others

Here’s where this gets uncomfortable, in the way I think good things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Because this letter isn’t only about what other people fail to see in me. It’s about what I fail to see in them.

I felt a small sting when that homeschool mom asked her question, because some part of me assumed she was quietly judging our choices. Maybe she was. But maybe, probably, she was just a tired mother of little ones, carrying her own private exhaustion, genuinely wondering if there was a way to do this that felt less overwhelming than what she was currently living. I don’t know her lev. I never asked. I touched one part of the elephant and decided I knew the whole animal.

And that’s the deeper truth this letter keeps circling back to. Almost everyone we meet is carrying something we cannot see. A grief they haven’t named. A private faithfulness no one will ever applaud. A long, slow healing happening in the dark. The way that mother raccoon worked while we slept. The way that woman at the well carried water at noon so no one would ask her any questions.

The woman in front of you at church, in the pickup line, in the comment section of something you read… she may be doing far better, or struggling far more, than her one visible branch suggests. You’re seeing leaves. You don’t know what’s happening at the roots. But God does. Lev all the way down. Every hidden hour, every act of tending something fragile and private, every prayer no one heard but Him, every long night of unseen work.

And because He sees fully, completely, we don’t have to spend our lives explaining ourselves to everyone who only ever sees the leaves. And maybe, slowly, we can stop assuming we know the whole tree just because we’ve touched one branch.

We are already fully seen, fully known, fully loved. That was true for the woman at the well before anyone in her town changed her mind about her. It’s true for you too, whether or not anyone watching your life ever fully understands it.

Until next time, may you rest knowing you are fully loved, fully seen, and fully forgiven.

With love from the edge of the forest, Raeanna

If today’s letter stirred something in you, whether you’re a homeschool mom, someone who’s just tired of being measured by what’s visible, or someone who caught yourself, like I did, realizing you’d done a little judging of your own… I’d love to hear about it. Come find me at atforestsedge.com, where you’ll find my art, my book, The Happy Little Sunflower: Finding Hope in the Valley, my newsletter, and a way to reach me directly. And if this one meant something to you, I’d be so grateful if you’d share it with another woman who might need to hear it too.