Foliage

There is an ongoing war between me and my yard and I'm pretty sure the yard is winning by a pretty comfortable margin. I spent almost three hours today working outside and still don't see a very noticeable difference although I do have a gigantic pile of organic material stacked up on my driveway. Here's some things that I learned and thought about during my stint outside (some funny, some serious):

1. When two bushes are so overgrown that they have become one bush and you don't realize it until you start cutting off pieces, you have waited to long to prune them.
2. If you seriously contemplate cutting down an entire bush because it's become so enormous that you can't reach part of your yard, that is a problem.
3. There are many spiders on the plants in my yard (this is probably not good in and of itself). I choose to believe that as soon as I cut off a branch the spiders abandon that piece for better accommodations. This enables me to pick up everything without worrying about those spiders.
4. When you realize that the "weed" you cut down is actually the size of a tree and you're going to have to check the Plano garbage regulations you maybe should have cut it down earlier.
5. Plants with stickers deploy evil weapons of pain when they are cut off from their branches...seriously, those things HURT!
6. Aphids will kill things completely if you don't step in with some kind of poison and kill them first.
7. God might have had to rescind His requirement of tending to the plants if I'd been in the garden of Eden.
8. You have to start somewhere if you're ever going to make progress on the outside of your house.
9. One can never underestimate the worth of a good pair of leather gardening gloves.

Now, since it's still me, here's just one of the thoughts that went through my mind as I went about my task:
Pruning is an absolute requirement for plants - it helps them to grow, makes them prettier, and generally increases the overall health of them. However, if you don't prune plants when you should the process of doing it later is much more extreme. First, the plants are bigger and more unshapely than they would have been but secondly, the inner branches tend to die off when they don't get sun and you have to be careful that you don't end up with just a bunch of twigs when you're done with the pruning.

I think we are the same way. We need to be shaped and remolded by the Lord and sometimes He needs to cut away parts of our lives in order to make us useful or help us to fit where He's called us. If we refuse to allow God to do the work that He needs to do in us it won't stop Him from eventually doing it. However, at that time it might be more painful and more extreme than it would have been if we'd allowed Him access to our lives all along.

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful."
~John 15:1-2

Please tell me I'm not the only person who is constantly thinking of random connections to the Lord. My mind just doesn't seem to stop thinking of things that I end up sharing with you. Thanks for reading and hope that the journeys through my thoughts aren't too odd! :)