verdurous faith

There is a bush in front of my house. It looks awful. This is my fault, because I had to go in with a saw and try to reclaim an unruly portion of our yard. Because of the lack of upkeep this particular plant has faced it kept on growing and looked like a massive entaglement of foliage. As I searched through the inner portions of the plant I noticed that much of it had died and was beginning to choke itself to death from the inside. All of the greenery that was showing came from just a few living branches that were struggling to survive. So I began to hack away at this plant with all hopes of a more sane and picturesque bush as a result.

When I had chopped away all of the dead parts, the bush itself looked really awful because now it was incredibly lop-sided and had no apparent shape or design to it at all. The only way I could begin to make this shrub into something nice was to prune the still living portions - some were pruned back a bit and some were pruned out entirely. Needless to say, I had quite the pile of lawn refuse lying behind me when I finished chopping away at this bush. Upon seeing such an outrageous sheering, my neighbor from next door came to survey the work and commented, "That bush really needed that! Last spring it hardly bloomed at all because it was choking itself out."

That made me feel better about the whole project.

One does not need to look far to understand the spiritual implications found in this little story, as pruning is a very simple and common biblical metaphor. However, I couldn't help but notice the amount of good stuff was being thrown out with the bad. It is as though the living portions of the bush had to be pruned because they were too intertwined into the dead shrub and were thus being choked out. This is why pruning can be a difficult process.

To remove a dead part wouldn't be that bad. . .because it's dead. The problem comes when we take spiritually dead parts of our lives and try to create something fruitful from them. We may be able to grow (for a while), but ultimately our core is being choked out. And we can never bloom in the season in which we are to do so.

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. . ."
~Jesus