Pruning & Life

Ever have a moment where God reveals something to you in the middle of doing something mundane? Tonight I had a few minutes after Selah went to bed to do some desperately needed pruning in our veggie patch.
As I snipped, I remembered watching a former neighbor (back in Sedalia) trimming her yard back at the beginning of spring. I felt like she was going waaaay overboard and in a strange sort of way, felt sorry for her plants. I really thought there was no way some of those plants would come back with how severely she was trimming. Well, wouldn't you know it, but a few weeks later, those plants were blooming beautifully - far more lovely than they had been before the pruning. I was shocked!
Looking at my own veggie patch today, I could relate to my neighbor. Some of my plants, though flourishing, needed trimming to allow for new growth to come. Some plants were struggling and needed dead parts to be pruned away. And others just needed sections cut away to allow light in.

Isn't that so like us?
Life has a way of getting crowded and busy until we can feel suffocated. New growth can't come because there's too much cluttering up our time. Sometimes we let things linger in our life that don't need to be there. As I look back, this post seems like such a description of the last year and a half for our family - trying so desperately to find God's place for us here and doing lots of good "things" but coming up empty and dry and lonely. We waited and longed for community but it seemed like our plea fell on deaf ears. It was an incredibly difficult season. Little did we know, in the midst of it all, our Abba was snipping away the dead and dry parts...pruning deep, to the parts where it hurt the most, stripping away things that had lingered too long. He was turning up the ground in our hearts for a new season with a new body of believers. And this body He has planted us into? It's more beautiful than we could have imagined.

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