Extract the Root, Watch Our Communities Breathe

By Josh Singleton | Founder, The Neighborhood Garden Project

In the garden, we’ve learned something the hard way—if you only pull what’s green above the soil, the weed always comes back. You can clear a plot and make it look clean. To most people, it’ll seem like progress. But if you don’t get the root, you didn’t fix anything. That root is still there, still pulling nutrients from the soil, still choking the good stuff we’re trying to grow. It’s quiet, but it’s stealing.

And that’s how the world often works. If something looks good on the surface—if the numbers line up, if the chart says “progress”—we call it success. But we’ve been in the soil long enough to know: if the root isn’t dealt with, it’s coming back. It might show up in new ways, with new names, but it’s the same thing—same pain, same cycles, same exhaustion.

I remember when I saw it in myself. I was thirty. Carrying weight I couldn’t name. I was at a buddy’s house, and for whatever reason, I decided to rip out the old bushes he complained about. As I dug, I realized those roots were wrapped around each other—years of growth tangled into one heavy knot. I had to sweat and fight for every inch. A neighbor walked by and said, “Those have been there for thirty years.” And it hit me, so did my pain.

The bitterness I carried, especially toward my parents, had been buried that long. But something broke loose in me that day. As the roots came out, I felt my heart open up. God met me there. Not with judgment, but with presence. That’s when I first heard Him call me Son.

This is real for us. We don’t talk theory—we talk soil. We walk with people who carry pain in their bones. Pain that shows up as health issues, stress, burnout, broken homes. And yes, those things matter. But we’ve learned not to go after the symptom. We go after the root.

If we deal with the root, the rest follows. That’s how God designed it. The symptoms are just signs—alerts that something underneath is taking up too much space. But the root? It hides. It doesn’t need sunlight. It doesn’t care how good the top looks. It’ll quietly kill everything around it if you let it.

And here’s the truth: you don’t have to plant weeds. You don’t have to water them. They show up because the world we live in—the pace, the pressure, the isolation—feeds them. That’s why we can’t just show up and hope. We have to be intentional. We have to notice. And we have to get low enough to pull the thing that’s really causing the pain.

The best part? It’s never too late. Even if a garden’s been overrun for years, healing starts the moment someone decides to dig. We’ve seen it. Lives change fast when the root finally comes out. And it’s not because of a quick fix. It’s because truth and love hit that root like water soaks a seed—it wakes up something new.

This is what we believe. We’re not here to manage problems. We’re here to walk people into wholeness. And wholeness doesn’t start with numbers—it starts with presence. It starts by not rushing. By digging side by side. By being the one who’s willing to get their hands dirty and stay long enough to see freedom come.

Most of the systems out there try to help by treating symptoms. But that just keeps people stuck. It creates a loop—people keep needing help, and the help keeps them needing. We’re not about that. We’re about walking with people until they don’t need us anymore. Until they’ve found the root, pulled it, and started growing.

We’ve seen it. We’ve watched young men who never knew what peace felt like finally breathe. We’ve watched moms exhale as their kids run free. We’ve watched people who swore they’d never trust “church stuff” again find God in the garden, not from a sermon, but from stillness, soil, and love without pressure.

That’s what the garden does. It tells the truth. And it gives people a place to heal.

So we ask: what are we really funding? Are we investing in outcomes or transformation? Are we walking with, or just handing out help? Because transformation takes time. It takes presence. It takes being okay with not measuring everything.

And maybe that’s where God actually shows up. Not in the plans or projections, but in the presence. In the root work. In the moments where someone finally feels safe enough to stop surviving and start becoming.

We’ve got to fund what breathes. We’ve got to walk with those who are digging. Because healing doesn’t happen from a distance. You’ve got to kneel down, hands in the soil, and pull the root. That’s where freedom starts. And when that root comes out, the whole garden breathes again—and sometimes, so does the world.