Jesus Showed Me a Tree I'd Never Seen in Scripture

The fruit was magenta. The leaves were shaped like the letter C. Then I opened my Bible to Philippians 1:11.

The suitcase sat by the door again. Another Sunday night, another flight Monday morning, another city where Bethany Heyne would prove she was worth the salary she was paid. She knew the drive to the airport by muscle memory.

What she didn’t know…what she couldn’t have known then, was that no amount of proving in the world was going to fill the place inside her that had started bleeding out.

Bethany had known the name of Jesus Christ since before she could tie her own shoes. She just hadn’t learned how to sit still long enough to let Him love her.

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A Name I Always Knew

I look back on my life and honestly cannot remember a day when I didn’t know the name of Jesus Christ. I was raised in a Christian home, baptized in the Catholic Church, and prayer was as natural as breathing in our house. My mother deeply loved the Lord and taught us not only about Scripture, but about a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

I still vividly remember being seven years old at Vacation Bible School in Bulverde, Texas, as I folded my hands, curled my knees in and bowed my head, asking Jesus to save me from my sins. Even as a child, I knew Jesus was real. I knew He loved me.

As I grew up, I stayed very involved in church and youth ministry. I loved serving, teaching, praying with people, and helping lead retreats. On the outside, my life looked strong. I was driven, disciplined, and high-achieving. I eventually pursued pharmacy, built a successful career, and kept moving forward toward the next accomplishment.

But what I didn’t realize was that somewhere along the way, I had learned how to work for God without really walking closely with Him.

I was working from my own strength rather than from His.

I knew who Jesus was. I even knew how to invite Him into difficult moments. But I had not learned how to fully surrender my life daily and walk with Him in dependence.

After my first marriage ended because of infidelity, something inside me broke deeply. My worth took a huge hit, and instead of bringing that pain honestly to Jesus, I tried to manage it through striving, control, relationships, and performance. I spent years trying to hold myself together externally while internally becoming more disconnected from God’s peace and direction.

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The Surrender Question

Eventually I met the man who is now my husband. I truly believed this relationship was from the Lord. He loved God, loved his children, and challenged me intellectually and spiritually in ways I had long hoped for.

But before we were married, the Lord asked me a question in prayer that I will never forget:

“Are you willing to give up this relationship if I ask you to?”

I wrestled with that question for two weeks.

Not because I doubted whether I loved God, but because I realized how much hope I had quietly placed in this relationship. I believed this marriage would finally become the thing that made life feel stable, safe, and whole.

Finally, through tears, I told the Lord yes. Yes, I would surrender the relationship if He asked me to.

Peace came and with it a promise: “this relationship won’t be easy, but it will be rewarding.”

Looking back now, I realize the Lord was not simply asking for obedience. He was exposing how easily we can place our hope in good things instead of in Him.

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What I Believed About Myself

Early in our marriage, hidden alcoholism and deep struggles surfaced, and suddenly the life I thought would be stable and beautiful became incredibly painful. There were seasons of grief, fear, confusion, and deep loneliness.

There is a kind of loneliness where you cannot even feel where your own heart has gone. And in that season, the Lord began exposing something much deeper in me.

A mentor once asked me a question that completely changed my life:

“What is it that you believe about yourself that allowed you to remain in this?”

At first, I didn’t understand the question. He clarified that as the daughter of the most high king this was not the life I was to be living. The Lord had something better; why did I allow the path to go this way instead of God’s way?

over time, the Lord revealed that much of my identity had quietly become rooted in performance. I believed my value came from succeeding, fixing problems, being needed, looking strong, and holding everything together.

And underneath all of it was this painful reality: I had slowly stopped trusting in the goodness of God.

I had stopped praying boldly. Stopped resting. Stopped depending on Him. Stopped truly believing He would meet me.

For years, after first learning about the infidelity, I had been living more out of self-sufficiency than surrender.

I was running. Hard and fast. Weekly travel often took me away from my family, and it was starting to tax my marriage and my children. But I didn’t see a way out of it because all I ever had known was proving myself and making my family proud.

But Jesus, in His mercy, met me there anyway.

Not by immediately removing the pain, but by sitting with me in it and slowly inviting me to release the vice grip that I held on the things that I thought mattered most.

Some of the most transformative moments of my life were not dramatic miracles. They were quiet mornings with Jesus. Mornings where He reminded me that before I was productive, successful, helpful, or impressive, I was simply loved.

The Lord began teaching me that intimacy with Him mattered more than anything I could accomplish for Him.

There was a season where He repeatedly brought me back to one lesson: surrender.

Not surrender once. Daily surrender. Surrendering my plans. My striving. My need to prove myself.

Even surrendering the things I had unknowingly placed above Him. Like my marriage, my career, my image.

Because honestly, in hindsight, what is there that I could possibly prove that was not already proved on the cross by Jesus Christ when he conquered everything for me?!

Yet still in my humanity I fall back into this pattern of wanting to prove myself.

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Under the Tree

During one particularly difficult season, I had a vision while praying with Jesus that I still carry deeply in my heart.

In the vision, we walked together through a meadow until we came to a tree. Jesus invited me to sit and rest beneath it. Rest has never come naturally to me. I have spent most of my life moving, producing, striving, and achieving.

But eventually I sat down, and after a while I laid my head in His lap and looked up into the branches above us.

The tree was covered in deep magenta fruit and leaves shaped like the letter C.

I asked Jesus, “What is this?”

And He answered: “This is the fruit of Christ.”

I remember feeling confused because I thought only of the fruit of the Spirit. But not long afterward during church, we turned to Philippians 1:11: “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ…”

And suddenly the vision made sense. I quickly drew a picture of the tree in the margin of my Bible.

Jesus was showing me that a fruitful life is not produced by human striving. It is produced by abiding in Him.

By remaining with Him. By sitting beneath the tree before trying to go bear fruit on my own.

This imagery is new to me just within the last year and so I am still unpacking. All there is to know and understand about the fruit of the righteousness of Jesus Christ and how to walk that out every day but I’m so grateful for this vision and this hope that he has given me that I don’t need to depend on myself. I need to depend on Him.

Now, my mornings look very different than they used to. I sit with Jesus. I pray. I listen. I let Him remind me who I am before the demands of the day begin speaking.

And I still don’t do this perfectly. I still catch myself drifting, and some days even running, back toward performance and pressure. achievement and accomplishment. Proof that I am valued and loved. But now I know better. I know the truth of my value. It’s not in my performance. It’s not in my marriage. It’s not in my work. It’s not in my parenting. It’s simply in being a daughter of the Most High King.

Jesus has shown me that human effort can accomplish many things outwardly, but only abiding in Him produces the fruit of righteousness.

Every day the Lord calls me to put my hope in him to hold everything together in the palm of his hands rather than in my own striving and self-sufficiency. Every day is an invitation for me to surrender to Jesus Christ.

And after more than three decades of knowing His name, I can honestly say the greatest freedom I’ve ever found is not in achievement, success, or having an easy life.

It is in sitting with Jesus under the tree of the fruit of righteousness, and finally believing that His love is enough.

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