Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On last week’s reposted essay, Mal Whitehorn commented these stirring words:
“Be Thou exalted, O LORD, in Thy strength; we will sing and praise Thy power.”
---Psalm 21:13
This is my heart’s desire and defence when tension and tending both feel like too much and I feel too little. I asked the Lord for life and He did give it. All of it, from the most joyous to the most painful. Through the faithful love of the Most High, I will not be shaken.
Come what may.
I believe El Elyon (God Most High) is on His throne forevermore.
So beautiful! Thank you, Mal!
If you want to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
she blooms as if to prove me wrong; scarlet skirt and crimson blush. she opened-- despite my clumsiness-- and in her blooming she speaks: every time you feel you've lost too much, she says, it's only death being pruned away.
In winter, I took my trimmers—and my resolve—and I pruned our climbing rosebush.
When we moved into this house, it came with a landscaped yard, the “wild” bits firmly separated from the “tame” ones. After living here now for a handful of years, the boundaries are not so clear. We live in a liminal space where the forest has inched a bit closer, the manicured shrubs have gotten shaggier, and the ornamental trees are ever taller.
For the most part, we like the wildness. It allows for more beneficial bugs, birds, and bats. We get more wildlife visitors and more variety of medicinal plants.
However.
The climbing rosebush became another matter entirely. She was attempting to consume the back wall of our woodshop, spindly limbs escaping her too-small trellis and leaning over in a very unbecoming way. A monstrous, overgrown, unhealthy thing!
So it was time for me to learn how to prune. And oh, did I prune! I must have entered a sort of flow state, because by the time I was finished I wasn’t sure if I had made the right decision. There was a high tangle of trimmed branches on the ground all around me, like the walls surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and the winter-bare rosebush seemed to stare at me in abject shock:
What have you done?!
I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t take it back. I just prayed that I hadn’t made a mistake. I had followed the instructions, and now there was nothing to do but wait.
Now, months later, it is July. And a few days ago, a shiver of scarlet red caught my eye as I was harvesting dandelions—a rose. A wide-open rose on a throne of fully leafed-out vines. The climbing rose had resurrected. Today, she is covered in blooms. And in fact, I’ve never seen her flowers and leaves more healthy, more vibrant.
The feeling of being pruned is not pleasant. At some point in adulthood, we all reach a stage where we’ve lost more than we would like. But sometimes it’s worth wondering: what have we become since the pruning began? In what ways have we miraculously regrown?
And most of all: Whose compassionate hand has done such a gracious pruning?
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I am drawn to the metaphor of pruning -- having been both pruner and prunee. :-) How many times has the Lord removed something from me that I was convinced I had to hold onto? And how many times have I realized later that He was right and I was responding in my usual human way, shortsighted, self-protective, and self-focused? "[E]very branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." John 15:2b
This is beautiful. I have been through many pruning seasons, and can attest that each & every pruning left me with healthier space to grow and grow I did!