When you feel like God has hacked you all to pieces…

I looked up at the tree, struck by this: Cultivating and killing sure look similar sometimes.

I remember the day they showed up. It had surprised me. Scared me, actually. I’d forgotten about the appointment, so when three scruffy looking men pounded on my door, I told the kids to hide and dialed Jeff,

“Babe, there are three weirdos here–can you come?”

He shot in from the office like a hero but smiled at me — “tree trimmers, Love!” — as he breezed past me to open the front door.

We watched the whole bloody business from the porch. 

They hacked up that tree til I was tempted to cover the kids’ eyes. Have mercy.

The thought did cross my mind,

“Why don’t you just chop the whole darn thing down, seeing as how you’re just hacking it to pieces limb by limb?? At least do the tree a favor and put it out of its misery!”

It seemed to me this was nothing more than death by pruning.

The chipper–a lighthearted name for that monstrous machine they hauled behind their truck–ate all the limbs with its grinding teeth, the deafening roar overwhelming the neighborhood. Every time they fed another trunk-sized tree branch into its massive mouth I shuddered just a little: All this destruction just to make our apple tree healthy? 

Finally, mercifully, it ended.

Pruning always does.

And the poor pitiful tree stood shorn, small. Sad.

Shamed? Somehow stripped of its glory.

Ridiculously, I wished I could somehow cover it up. When King David’s men were shamed and shorn by enemies, he told them to wait until their beards had grown before they returned to Jerusalem. He compassionately kept them from shame. I wished I could do that somehow.

And then I came to my senses: Kari, it’s a TREE.

But brutal nonetheless is this commonplace practice of pruning.  It’s necessary. Needful.  And Oh! do the blossoms bloom just a few months later when the sun sweetly shines and all the nutrients are concentrated in the few branches left and bring glorious goodness and FRUIT–Oh the fruit!–when summer comes.

Pruning takes place in the bitterness of winter. It seems almost unbearable that such a painful process should take place in the most merciless of months. No solace of sunshine–just cold, dark days and bare nubs of branches cut brutally short. And that poor tree, doesn’t even know it’s coming. We never do.

But this is how God makes us grow.

Jesus said,

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 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. (John 15:1-2 ESV)

Strangely enough, the apple tree was the only plant on our property that we valued enough to have professionally pruned.The others we either ignored or trimmed ourselves. Only the apple tree–our best tree–had the honor of being thoroughly massacred. And we paid a pretty penny for it. Why?

We value that apple tree a lot. Its fruit is delicious. We want it to last forever. We want to do all we can to make sure that tree is as healthy as can be, as productive as can be, as happy as can be. *smile*

Recently, God did some pruning of me as well. Inside I felt hacked to pieces, stripped, shorn.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I told Him through tears.  “I just want to run away and hide.”

But deep down I knew He was pruning, because He loves me.

Because I’m valuable to Him. 

And so are you. 

Cultivating and killing may see a lot alike, but the Professional Pruner, the Heavenly Husbandman, knows exactly how to hack bits off for optimum health, blessing, fruit, joy…

Trust Him in this.

{Oh praying this brings hope to you today. Thanks for reading.}