Last week I took my parents to Sequoia National Park in California. My mom and dad have had a lifelong dream of seeing the giant sequoias. I remember my mother talking about them when I was a boy, when we’d dream about where to go on family vacation. To my young imagination, it sounded like some faraway enchanted land—like Narnia—where you might stumble upon talking animals or wood dwarves.

As kids, we had an old View-Master with a reel of the national parks. I can still remember clicking through those tiny 3-D images of Yosemite and Sequoia. So what a joy it was to finally arrange and accompany my parents on this adventure. At 85 and 83, they’ve still got it!

It’s hard to describe the excitement of climbing from 800 to nearly 6,000 feet over 18 miles of winding switchback roads leading up to the Giant Forest. The drive itself was a rush—negotiating steep drop-offs and hairpin turns, often with no guardrail. As you ascend, the air grows thinner, cooler, and fresher. Then, suddenly, you round one last bend, and there it is—your first sequoia. Immense. Ancient. Towering above the canopy.

We had to get out of the car to see it properly because you couldn’t crane your neck far enough from inside. It’s particularly jaw-dropping when you see people at the base scurrying around—they look about the size of squirrels.

And the granddaddy of them all, the General Sherman Tree, did not disappoint. It’s the largest living tree by volume on earth. It stands 275 feet tall, more than 36 feet in diameter at the base, and contains over 52,000 cubic feet of wood. Estimated to be around 2,200 years old and weighing nearly 2.7 million pounds, it grows enough new wood each year to equal a 60-foot tree. If you were to fell it and craft kitchen chairs, you could make more than 100,000 of them.

Because of the government shutdown, all the museums were closed. But we learned much from the plaques along the paths. Sequoias thrive only in a narrow habitat—between 5,000 and 7,000 feet on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. The soil there is thin and sandy, and just beneath it lies a layer of solid granite, impenetrable and unyielding. Their roots can’t drill downward into deep, rich earth because there isn’t any. Instead, they spread out wide—sometimes more than a hundred feet from the trunk—intertwining with the roots of neighboring trees in an intricate web of mutual support.

That means the world’s largest trees—the height of the Statue of Liberty and the weight of a battleship; trees that have stood for millennia and endured raging fires, floods, and mountain winds—are anchored in just a few feet of sandy soil sitting on top of solid rock. Their strength isn’t in how deep they go, but in how far they reach.

There’s a sermon in that, right?

That network of roots made me think again about the way God designed the church. I know “connectedness” is a buzzword that’s been talked to death—but standing there among those trees, it didn’t feel like a cliché. It felt essential.

The truth is, life hits hard. The enemy doesn’t fight fair. People get knocked down. Faith gets tested. And when the ground shifts beneath you, the thing that keeps you standing isn’t how much you know or how strong you feel—it’s the people your roots are tangled up with. The ones who pray when you can’t. Who steady you when you start to lean. Who sit with you when there’s nothing to say and remind you what’s true when your own heart forgets.

That’s not sentimentality; it’s spiritual physics. Isolated believers topple. Intertwined believers endure.

Paul described it this way: “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16).

The giant sequoias have learned that in order to grow high, you have to reach wide. They’ve learned what many Christians in the West have forgotten—that following Jesus isn’t a solo sport and walking in obedience is never a solo achievement. It’s the quiet miracle of being held together by something greater than ourselves.

So the secret to living in victory or finishing strong isn’t necessarily digging deeper into our own resources for stability—it’s reaching wider into others for strength. God designed our faith to spread out, to intertwine, to hold one another up when life presses hard.

The writer of Hebrews said, “Encourage one another daily… so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Hebrews 3:13). In other words, don’t go it alone. A faith that stands alone is a faith that can topple.

Sequoias don’t survive because the ground is perfect—they survive because they’re connected. And maybe that’s the invitation for us too: not to find firmer ground, but to grow stronger roots in one another.

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2

The sequoias remind me that lasting strength isn’t found in standing tall—it’s found in standing together.