I love plants. I may be the crazy plant lady with palm trees in her living room. They join us inside every winter and enjoy the sunshine outside every summer. I don’t really do much to maintain my plants; I pretty much just water them and make sure that they get sunlight. I have always wanted an orchard at my house; not a giant one, but a mini one. I have yet to make it happen; however, I picked up two blueberry bushes in late spring on a trip to Sam’s Club. After I got them home, they sat on my counter for a week as I realized it was too early to plant them outside yet due to the cold and frost. To keep them alive in the meantime, I planted them in planters, and added them to the ever growing number in my living room, bringing my total plant count in that room to 10. Thankfully my husband loves me. Haha!
Before transplanting my blueberry bushes to their pots, I read the instructions carefully. Here’s what they said:
“The first year, remove most of the flower blooms as they appear. In the future years, blueberry plants should be heavily pruned each year to avoid over-fruiting, which results in small fruit or poor growth. Every year remove low growth around the base and remove deadwood. Aggressive, annual pruning will produce healthier, more vigorous plants and more fruit productions.”
This stopped me in my tracks. How true this is for our spiritual lives as well. I pondered the meaning of these words in that light. “Aggressive, annual pruning will produce healthier, more vigorous plants and more fruit production.”
Getting stuff “pruned” does not feel good, but getting “pruned” now produces a better fruit crop later.
John 15 discusses this concept precisely. John 15:2 “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.”
I don’t know where you are in life.
Are you in the early stages of growth where you feel like all the flowers that could bear fruit are being pruned off? To the outward eye, this feels wasteful! While it’s true that those flowers could produce fruit, pruning them will bring a better return for the years to come. This can be a difficult thing to wrap our human minds around. It may sometimes even feel confusing when parts of our life that look essentially healthy and good are pruned. It’s hard work now, but God is refining who we are.
Maybe you are already in a stage when you are producing fruit. Good things may be happening, and fruit is being produced, but maybe the growth you see or the fruit you are yielding is smaller than it could be. Allow God to continue that pruning process. Just because you are producing fruit doesn’t mean you are yielding the quality of fruit you potentially could.
You may find yourself in the annual pruning stage. A season of being pruned aggressively, left and right. That isn’t an easy place to be. No one wants to have so many parts of themselves cut away while it’s happening, but later on down the road, the bountiful, healthy fruit produced by the difficult season of pruning is worth it.
Being refined by God is a continual process of life. Pruning can happen to us in all different ways, and sometimes it comes from good things, sometimes it comes from complex situations. God uses so many various tools to prune us.
Pruning is a necessary part of life for us to achieve all that God has created us to be. God desires good for us. We can be confident of this. He wants the best for us.
The reward will be worth it! Hang in there. Accept the process and allow God to do what he needs to do.
Awesome gurlie