Growing Toward Light You Cannot See

In botany, there is a phenomenon called negative gravitropism. When a seed germinates underground — buried in total darkness, pressed beneath the weight of soil — it faces what seems an impossible moment. It has never seen sunlight. It has no proof that light exists above. Yet something within that seed sends its first tender shoot upward, pushing against gravity, against the weight of the earth itself, reaching toward a light it cannot yet see.

The plant hormone auxin, first described by Dutch botanist Frits Went in 1926, redistributes within the stem in response to gravity, directing growth upward. The seed does not need to see the sun to grow toward it. The instruction is already written within.

This is how El Shaddai, the Almighty, has designed courage to work in our lives. We do not need to see the outcome before we take the first step. We do not need proof that the light is there. God has placed something within every one of His children — a holy impulse that says, push upward, grow toward the light.

The apostle Paul understood this when he wrote, "We walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). Courage is not the absence of darkness or the removal of the weight pressing down on you. Courage is the decision to grow upward anyway — trusting that the God who planted you in that soil has already prepared the light above.