If you've driven through the South, you know the image… entire treelines swallowed whole, every individual form buried under a mass of relentless green. That's kudzu. And I think most of us have some version of it growing in the interior landscape of our lives.

Here's the part that I couldn't shake when I started researching this: kudzu wasn't snuck in. It was invited. Celebrated, actually. The U.S. government paid farmers to plant it in the 1930s because it looked like a solution to a real problem. By the 1950s it was classified as a weed. By the 1970s, a federal pest. What was subsidized and welcomed became what devoured the landscape.

That's the episode. Because the things that do the most damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious rebellion, they're the things we welcomed in because they looked like solutions. The coping mechanism that made total sense in the season we adopted it. The way of thinking about ourselves that started as protection and became a prison.

And here's the harder truth I had to say out loud first. You can deal with the vine all day long. Cut it, name it, make a commitment. But if you don't deal with the root, it simply waits and resends. The kudzu root goes seven feet deep and weighs four hundred pounds. The vine is just evidence. The root is the conversation.

This one's a little uncomfortable. But I think it's the kind of uncomfortable that's actually really good for us.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

I was standing outside in Florida looking at the trees when it hit me. That gray, ghostly draping hanging off the branches stopped me in my tracks. And my first thought was: that's dead, right?

Wrong. Completely wrong. And what I found out next sent me down a rabbit hole that turned into this episode.

What most of us call Spanish moss isn't a moss at all. It's a flowering plant (an air plant) with no root system in the ground, no connection to the tree it rests on, and no need to take anything from what holds it. It draws everything it needs straight from the atmosphere. And those gray threads that look so lifeless? Wet them, and the whole plant turns green. The life was there the entire time. You just couldn't see it in the dry season.

I think a lot of us are in dry seasons right now. And I think a lot of us have been misreading them. We look at stillness and call it death. We look at dormancy and conclude something is fundamentally, permanently wrong. We do it to ourselves and we do it to the people we love.

So this episode is my case (biblically and botanically) for why that diagnosis is almost always wrong.

Dormancy is not death. And I think you need to hear that today.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

Tim Timmons was given five years to live over two decades ago. He is still living with cancer, but he is also one of the most genuinely free people I have ever had a conversation with.

You might know Tim from Even If, one of the most honest songs about suffering and faith written in the last decade. What you may not know is that he co-wrote it while actively living the question. Not hypothetically. Not as a songwriter fishing for a good lyric, but as someone who was in it when he wrote it.

Now there's a film, I Can Only Imagine 2, with Milo Ventimiglia playing Tim. And one of the most disarming things Tim said in this conversation was what it felt like to sit in a theater, watch someone else suffer as him, and finally grieve things he'd just been pushing through for years.

We talk about the X he writes on his wrist every single morning, not a tattoo, a daily practice, as well as what it means to stop building your own little suburb in the kingdom of God and just join what Jesus is already doing.

Most importantly, we talk about what it means to have faith on the days you're only 75% sure any of this is real. Tim's honesty about that alone is worth the listen.

Tim’s Website: https://www.timtimmonsmusic.com/
Tim on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timmonsmusic/
Tim’s Book: https://tinyurl.com/yajmp86n
Tim’s Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/tim-timmons/161283355
Tim on QAVA: https://qava.tv/imagine