Pruning

Hacking tree limbs.  That’s what I did today and a fair part of yesterday.  Known as “pruning” for the gardening elite.  However when you are “pruning” fifteen or so 12-foot trees down to approximately 6 feet in height, it’s more like hacking!  Have you ever used the roof of your car as a ladder?  Picture this: lining up your car perfectly next to a maple that is just getting a little too friendly with the wires overhead.  Now you make sure that when you hack off the offending limb it doesn’t take down the wires or damage your car…that WOULD end rather badly! Did I mention I use my Grandpa’s old hand saw and not a wimpy chain saw?  My right hand has a beautiful shade of ultramarine blue spreading over the knuckles, no pain, just a “lovely” bruise!

So all this elimination of dead weight got me thinking.  I’ve done a lot of pruning in my life in recent years as well.  From losing weight, trimming food choices, saying good-bye to toxic relationships, eliminating frivolous bills like excess cable and a landline phone.  But the most important pruning I’ve worked on is the stripping away of secular society’s ideas of what I should be doing with my life.  I’ve replaced it with what God calls me to do each and every day.  That is...when I listen and put it into action! 

You know what I mean…that gut reaction of knowing what you are supposed to do and not wanting to do it because you have your own idea of what is best.  So you “do your own thing” and WHAM!  Something, somewhere, somehow gets messed up.  Then you kick yourself for not listening to your “gut” to begin with!  Welcome to my life!  Chances are it’s your life too!  Well we are both in good hands because God is well aware of our weaknesses and our failings and he’s going to catch us when we fall.  We have to allow him to catch us and be willing to accept the responsibility of our actions and then prune them in the greatest way possible, through reconciliation.  This is the absolute pruning that will lift away the weight of the world.  When I added monthly reconciliation into my life it was the best move I ever made.  It stripped me down, exposed my wounds and pruned the sins off my soul, preventing them from taking root and growing to a point of needing to be hacked off.  Thanks to pruning, I’m in a much better place than I was before…as are my trees.