What Holds Us Up

A few years ago, on an ordinary summer day, I was sitting in the living room visiting with my niece when we heard a loud crack.

Then came a seemingly endless moment before the inevitable crash.

In the deafening silence that followed, everyone sat perfectly still.

No one wanted to look.

And yet, within seconds, we all found ourselves moving almost like a single organism toward the front door.

What we saw took a moment to sink in.

A fifty-foot tree that had stood in our yard for decades was splayed across the lawn.

That tree had been a shady refuge under which my children played, a delightfully colorful accent every fall, and a sentinel overlooking our home.

And now it was lying on the ground.

There had been no storm.

No wind.

No warning.

Just...timber.

We called a tree service to remove it, and that's when we learned something even more surprising.

The tree had been slowly dying from the inside out for quite some time.

We couldn't believe it.

It had looked perfectly fine.

Healthy, even.

But one look at the stump left behind told a very different story.

What appeared strong and healthy above ground had been quietly weakening where we couldn't see it.

That was the part I couldn't stop thinking about.

Nothing had happened that afternoon to bring the tree down. The problem had been developing quietly for years.

And I've come to realize that businesses can have their own version of that.

From the outside, everything can look perfectly healthy.

Customers are coming in.

Revenue is growing.

The bills are getting paid.

But the things that support that growth aren't always as easy to see.

Maybe profits aren't keeping pace with revenue. Maybe the systems that worked beautifully at one stage of the business are beginning to strain at the next. Maybe too much depends on one person holding everything together.

That's the tricky thing about foundations.

When they're doing their job well, we hardly notice them.

And when they're beginning to weaken, we may not notice that either.

Sometimes the first visible sign of a problem arrives long after the problem itself.

The tree didn't begin dying the afternoon it fell.

That was simply the afternoon we could finally see it.

That tree stood in our yard for decades.

It weathered storms, shaded my children, and gave us every reason to believe it would still be standing there tomorrow.

Until it wasn't.

I think that's why I've developed such an appreciation for the things we don't always see.

The systems.

The preparation.

The financial health.

The quiet work happening underneath everything we're trying to grow.

None of it is particularly exciting when it's working the way it should.

But maybe that's the point.

The strongest foundations rarely call attention to themselves.

They simply make everything above them possible.