The Well Beneath the Soil
Rediscovering the Sustaining Power Hidden in Plain Sight
By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
Most plants don’t die from lack of opportunity. They die from shallow roots. As Jesus said in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:5–6), some seeds sprang up quickly but withered when the sun rose, because they had no root. Shallow growth can look promising in good conditions, but it cannot survive the heat.
That’s the truth we’ve seen again and again in the garden. When the rains come, every plant looks green. Every leaf perks up. Growth seems effortless. But when the rains stop—when summer heat presses in and the irrigation is removed—only those with deep roots survive. The rest wither. At first glance, it looks like a water issue. But it’s not. It’s a root issue.
What’s striking is that nearly all vegetables—the performers we prize for quick results—are shallow-rooted by nature. They can grow fast, yield early, and look vibrant in the right conditions, but they cannot survive without consistent surface-level inputs. This is why we invest in drip irrigation, mulching, and careful scheduling. Their fruitfulness is real, but fragile. It depends entirely on what’s maintained above the surface. In this way, vegetables teach us something vital: speed and productivity don’t equal sustainability.
Everything around these quick performers is sustained by something deeper. The trees that shade them. The mycorrhizal networks that stabilize the soil. The deeper-rooted perennials and cover crops that draw water from where irrigation can't reach. There is a quiet infrastructure below the surface that sustains the system long after the surface harvest is gone. In a world saturated with beauty and sustained by the Creator Himself, we somehow still fail to believe that the same sustaining power is available to us. In a short span of time, God designed a system to nourish the earth, to water every living thing, and to keep creation flourishing. Yet we struggle to fathom that He would sustain us at every level—spiritually, emotionally, physically, and relationally. We’ve been taught that indigenous ways—ways that walked with the land and read the sky—are no longer practical in our Western, modernized world. And as a result, the gap continues to widen. We further isolate ourselves. We lose our sensitivity to the very rhythms that once shaped all life. We forget how to feel the earth’s pulse.
In our haste and striving, we don’t lean into the trees planted in every median. We don’t lean into the cool breeze or the heat wave. We’ve seen these as inconveniences, not invitations. The created world around us was never meant to be ignored or overcome—it was meant to be read. It speaks, if we’re listening. It groans, if we’re still. And in the slowing down, in the re-rooting, we are reminded that we were never meant to sustain ourselves. We were meant to root deeply into the One who sustains all things.
It’s a reminder that while quick growth can be useful, it cannot carry a life or a mission on its own. Without deeper roots in the ecosystem—or in the Kingdom—it all withers when the pressure comes.
Surface water is like a 9-to-5 job with a steady paycheck. It’s predictable. It gets the bills paid. It can even provide a sense of rhythm or stability. But the source is external. It only works when the skies cooperate—when the economy is stable, when your boss is pleased, when the system you depend on doesn’t break. It builds a life of dependency on what is outside of you. In the garden, surface water comes from rainfall or irrigation. In life, it comes from what culture hands out—prescribed systems and pathways that offer security, but rarely offer fulfillment. These shallow inputs can look like a gift, but they often become a trap. They keep us alive just enough to never ask if we’re truly living.
But some plants don’t need daily watering. They’ve gone deeper. They’ve tapped into the capillary fringe, that hidden place above the aquifer where water quietly rises from below. They’re not relying on rain anymore. They’ve accessed something older, more stable, more faithful. This is what it looks like to live from assignment instead of employment. It means you’ve been sent, not hired. It means your life flows from obedience, not performance. You’re no longer chasing provision. You’re receiving what was already made available in the unseen, often long before you were even aware of the invitation. Deep water doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up on the surface or broadcast its presence to the impatient. Like Jesus, who often withdrew to lonely places to pray (Luke 5:16), the depth is discovered not through display but through hidden intimacy. It’s cultivated away from the crowds, in quiet places where no one is watching but the Father. It must be found through formation—the slow, hidden, Spirit-led process of being shaped beneath the soil. Formation is what prepares the roots to go deep. It’s where hunger meets humility, where striving gives way to stillness, and where the unseen work begins to tap into the eternal supply God has already placed beneath your life. Without formation, we may know about the water, but the unwillingness to go through formation is often what keeps us from ever embodying it. We may talk about depth, dream about freedom, even admire those who carry it—but without surrender to the process that forms us, it will remain distant, abstract, untouched.
Formation is the edge, and most turn back because it demands more than agreement—it asks for abandonment of the old systems that kept us shallow. We’ll never touch it.
You can’t fake deep roots. In the garden, a shallow-rooted plant will always need help. It will beg for water, wither in heat, and demand constant attention. But a deeply rooted plant can go unnoticed for weeks and still thrive. It doesn’t panic. It doesn’t chase after the weather. It draws from the deep—faithfully, quietly, steadily. That’s how we discern in the Garden Project. Who’s anchored, and who’s not. Who’s showing up to find rest in the deep, and who’s still trying to survive off the surface.
Surface water is culture-driven, transactional, dependent on systems, and obsessed with outcomes. It offers short-term results but requires constant maintenance. Deep water is Spirit-led, transformational, anchored in presence, and rooted in process. It sustains through silence and pressure. It cannot be controlled, only received. Jesus didn’t offer us a job. He gave us work—a way of abiding, not striving. As He said in John 15:4–5, "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine—whose roots are eternally anchored in the depths of God—neither can you, unless you abide in me." And that work wasn’t shallow. It was rooted in presence, watered by surrender, and cultivated in secret places.
This is the danger: you can live an entire life from the surface and never know what it means to drink from the deep. You can perform well within the cultural framework, achieve recognition within institutional models, and still remain spiritually starved. You can build a stable income, meet personal goals, master your routines, and even be publicly praised for your productivity—all while your inner life is disjointed and your roots remain too shallow to sustain you when the deeper tests of life arrive. The tragedy is not in failing to grow, but in believing you have, only to realize later that your root system was never formed. And without roots, everything visible can collapse in a moment. It is not the surface success that saves us. It is the unseen surrender beneath it.
You can chase provision and never experience the joy of being sustained. There is a difference. Provision can be pursued like a commodity—hunted down, negotiated for, and spent the moment it’s earned. But being sustained is different. It’s quiet. It doesn’t look like chasing. It looks like resting. Like receiving. Like waking up and realizing the vine never ran out, the oil never ran dry, the bread never stopped multiplying. It’s the rhythm of Elijah by the brook, of manna in the wilderness, of Jesus breaking loaves until there were baskets left over.
Jesus touched this same longing at the well in John 4. He told the woman that the water she was used to—external, repetitive, temporary—would always leave her thirsty. Her whole life had been built around shallow systems that could never satisfy. But what He offered was something radically different: a well that would spring up within her. A source that wouldn’t depend on rain or effort or ritual. A deep, internal sustaining. It was the better alternative, but it required surrender. She had to leave behind what she had always relied on, expose the truth of her own need, and trust that the water He offered would actually hold. What Jesus was pointing to was not just emotional relief, but a complete re-rooting. A shift from shallow roots to a living well. A life not just surviving, but saturated from within.
And just imagine—this was not a prophet speculating about design. This was the Author Himself, in the flesh, speaking to His creation about the very blueprint He set into motion at the beginning of time. The One who separated the waters above from the waters below. The One who formed rivers to flow and rain to fall. Now offering water that would never run dry. A spring that would never need to be turned back on. A source that didn’t need to be earned, only received.
And somehow, we’ve reduced His entire ministry to a matter of heaven or hell. As if the Son of God stepped into time just to offer a post-death destination. But what He came to restore was far more than an afterlife—it was a present, embodied, Kingdom reality. The invitation to walk with God again, now, not someday. He came to rebuild Eden’s access through Himself. Yet we've traded that reality for an outcome-based religion, stripped of presence, filled with performance. And in doing so, we’ve missed the everyday, deeply practical wisdom He demonstrated: rest, abiding, silence, obedience, and trust. Principles woven into creation itself, now reintroduced through the living Word made flesh.
And in that moment, Jesus was not only revealing a spiritual truth—He was inviting us back into the rhythm we had lost, Genesis 1 and 2. He was reintroducing us to the original order, where humanity lived sustained by God in an environment perfectly tuned to their needs. The Kingdom was arriving not from the top down, but from the bottom up. From soil. From water. From Spirit. From within. He wasn’t just making a point—He was making a way back home.
And the truth is, many of us are still lingering at that well, torn between what we’ve known and what we now see. The shallow systems have never satisfied, but surrender still feels costly. We stand where she stood, with our buckets in hand, unsure if what we’ve carried all this time is worth laying down. The well is deep, but so is the resistance in us. It’s easier to draw from what’s familiar than to risk everything on water we’ve never tasted.
Yet the invitation remains: to stop drawing from broken cisterns, to stop returning to cracked vessels and shallow sources, and instead to trust the Source that never runs dry. This is not a future promise. It is a present one. Not someday—now. And the only path forward is not through force, but surrender. To believe that the life hidden in the deep is better than the illusion offered on the surface.
And to those who feel called to a deeper assignment but are caught in the pressure of daily obligations, God wants to reframe that reality for you. Nothing you have is yours—your breath, your energy, your ability to wake up in the morning, the roof over your head, the food on your table, the clothes on your back. These have all been gifts of mercy, quiet provisions of a God who has sustained you without demand. Open doors into a reality you’ve already been living—being upheld even when you didn’t acknowledge it.
And the truth is, He’s not asking you to leap into some unknown chaos. He’s showing you that you’ve already been carried this far. Passively ungrateful perhaps, only because we haven’t fully seen it. But now He invites you to see clearly. If He’s been faithful in the shallow, sustaining you in spite of systems and cycles that weren’t built to last, how much more will He sustain you in your assignment? He wants to shift your perspective—to lift your eyes beyond control and into the Kingdom. And the Kingdom is only seen in the unseen. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t sell. It whispers in the silence, “Come. I will sustain you still.”
The cost is surrender—but the return is rest.
Living from the surface will always keep you dependent on the weather, on conditions you cannot control. On people who may fail you. On systems that were never meant to carry your soul. It will feel secure until it suddenly doesn’t. And by the time the rain stops, it may be too late to send roots downward. This is why the soil tells the truth. It reveals what cannot be hidden when conditions change. The ones who survive are not the ones who grew fast, produced early, or looked the most impressive. It’s the ones who went deep before they were ever seen. The ones who didn’t wait for the storm to start digging.
In Kingdom terms, this is not a metaphor—it’s a mirror. When testing comes, when shaking arrives, when the rain stops, your roots will be exposed for what they are. And this is not a punishment. It’s mercy. Because God doesn’t want to feed a surface-level life. He wants to sustain one that is unshakable. And that kind of life requires roots that drink from the deep.
Shallow roots can grow tall in perfect conditions. But they topple quickly when the wind blows. Deep roots don’t grow for show. They grow for survival. They grow in silence. In secret. Through pressure, time, and surrender. They grow because the plant trusts that water exists even if it cannot be seen.
So if your life has looked green and successful on the surface but dry underneath, this is not condemnation. It’s invitation. You don’t need more rain. You need deeper roots. You don’t need better systems. You need better soil. You don’t need to keep chasing the surface. You need to be held long enough in stillness for your roots to finally begin their descent into the water that doesn’t dry up.
Because when the weather changes—and it will—it won’t be your resume, your reputation, or your rhythm that saves you. It will be whether your life was built on the Rock. As Jesus said in Matthew 7:24–27, the house that withstood the storm was the one founded on obedience to His words—anchored not in appearance, but in substance. Surface foundations wash away. Only those rooted in the rock remain. It will be the roots. The hidden, faithful, quiet roots that refused to remain shallow when the invitation to go deep arrived.
