I’m watching the azalea bushes get ripped out by the roots, and it feels all wrong, seeing the new growth broken and laid to the ground, remembering the pink and purple blossoms that covered them in the beginning of Summer. All the shrubs by the house have grown too big and are crowding the porch, the front steps. They all have to go, the landscaper says. How can it be a bad thing for living things to grow tall and spread out, like they were meant to do?

It never makes sense to let go of good things in life, when they are still productive and meaningful. It is instinctive to preserve the beautiful, the healthy and growing, logical to stick with it if the results are good, to enjoy the fruit we have earned. And why would anyone deliberately cut off something that benefits? I don’t have the eyes to see it. In the middle of this upheaval and what looks like destruction, all I can do is trust the gardener’s vision of what it could look like, made new.

Jesus said His Father was a wise Gardener, biding His time, with His eyes looking ahead into the next season: “…every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:2)

It feels like losing something, when good things are cut off– like being wounded and left crippled, betrayed somehow…but hear Him say it in no uncertain terms, that it is the fruitful branches that get cut back, so that the Father can grow them larger and fuller with His own strength in the next season. We may not understand the process, but we can at least trust the Gardener and His loving hands, who does all things well.

The branch knows the cut, the raw ragged edge, the ooze of inner strength seeping away; the Father sees the future shoots that will grow from the wounding, the leaves and fruit and beauty that will emerge slowly, over time.  His time, that we don’t have eyes to see yet, unless they be the eyes of faith. Spring always comes, and there is always hope. There will be flowers again.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope, and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

“…there is a counter-intuitiveness to it:  to pluck off certain life activities that will yield good fruit. Some might even think it foolish to pare back, when the bloom and gifting [are] apparent; a good harvest inevitable. Yet it’s the pruning of seemingly good blooms that grows a better life. ” (Ann VosKamp)