Is It Pruning Time?
How fruitful is your garden?
What are the fruits of your garden?
Do you take time each year to prune and trim and weed, or do the flowers and fruits just come as they will?
Jesus said to his disciples, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. - John 15: 1-2
It is hard to read today's Gospel from John without thinking about being cut.
If we focus on the pruning back of the least fruitful branches, we conjure up images of layoffs at work and reductions in services, but if we do that, we miss an important point.
What we do with our lives matters.
What we produce with our talents matters.
If we follow the metaphor Jesus gives us, we see that we are all part of the living vine. We exist in Him and are alive through Him, but we still need to bear fruit.
If we bear no fruit, we are cut and yet if we do bear fruit, we are trimmed back to channel our energy and nourishment into the most fruitful parts of the branch.
There is a lesson here.
We need to find the most fruitful part of ourselves and put all our efforts there.
But we don't have to do that alone. According to Jesus, the Father will do it for us. We just have to be alive and fruitful and He will prune us back to make us more fruitful than we can imagine.
I believe that happens through the Holy Spirit working within us, giving us strength and wisdom to help us grow and bloom more productively.
Sometimes, what we think are setbacks, failures, obstacles in our path, may just be pruning to direct and guide us to something much more productive and meaningful in our lives.
Sure, it is painful.
We don't like to lose or changed, but if we stay the course, we may be surprised at the outcome.
So, for me, today's lesson is for me to learn to accept changes, even when they are painful or unexpected. I need to see them as opportunities to move in a different direction, to channel my efforts on a more fruitful endeavor.
Perhaps I can even learn to prune myself, to shed the least productive tasks and focus on the ones that bear the most fruit.
I can do that by inviting the Spirit to help me choose wisely, with His purpose in mind, not mine.
That requires more than my will. It requires humility.
More to come...