I think my plants positively hate me after what I've done to them today. Every little pretty pink flower got cut, every bush pruned away from the house and brought back within the boundary of the garden. Florida summer requires occasional buzz cuts otherwise the jungle takes over. There is a part of me that hates pruning as much as my plants do (or at least I think they do, but maybe I am just projecting my own feelings on them). It doesn’t seem to make sense to cut perfectly healthy plant down to the bone so to speak… except that its vigorous limbs (a friend once called them “overachievers”) get out of bounds. But the more I am turning into a gardener, the less I am concerned about the “little pretties” – the eye-catching prodigious blooms immortalized by a photographer’s lens at just the right moment and then artfully paraded on the pages of Better Homes and Gardens for the novices to drool over – and the more I am interested in the health and the vitality of each plant and how it fits in the larger design of the garden as a whole. Is it stressed out by too many limbs and needs to be simplified so her energies can be channeled into just few healthy branches which would eventually produce vigorous growth? Is it dead? Or sick – either under attack by plant-munching insects or malnourished through insufficient supply of water and nutrients? Has it been serving the garden well for several years now, and it’s time to retire it into the compost pile and give some new plant a chance?

My plants don’t have my eyes (most of them don’t have eyes at all). They can’t see themselves (for better or for worse) or the way I see them fit in the particulars of our small plot of land located in the central part of the large peninsula called Florida dangling off the United States of America proper. They don’t even know how beautiful they are and the magical effect their simple existence can have on me and other lovers of beauty. The pain I inflict on them by cutting their healthy growth may not make much sense, but if they do surrender to the two laws of gardening - the law of death administered by my pruning shears and the law of life already active within them – the results can be quite astounding.

Like my plants, I acknowledge my need to surrender to the Gardener’s pruning tools and continue yielding myself to the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus active within me thus allowing the life-generating interaction of the two principles to have their full effect in me. The death and the cutting that I am experiencing now is not a random, indiscriminate or even angry outburst of impersonal fate or chance. It is an infinitely wise, skillful, loving hand of the master Gardener at work, cutting away what once was alive but now is dead, subduing the unruly outshoots of this proud overachiever, channeling the energy of many life-sapping directions and activities into just few. The pruning is never an end to itself. The pruning has its life-giving effect both for the plant in particular and for the unique, personalized design of the garden and how it fits with the lawn and the house, the patio and the swing, the street and the neighborhood, but most importantly with the owner of it all and his children. When God puts His surgical knife to a recurring thought process or activity, attitude or personality trait, ambition or drive all I see and feel is the pain, my pain! I don’t see how I may be blocking somebody’s view or access to the source of light, causing somebody to trip over, or damaging the roof on their house. I am blind to how my overgrown limb is casting a truth-thwarting shadow on the presence and activity of God in my brother's life. But Spirit of Jesus does – and His love for me as well as for my neighbor makes Him pick up that pruning knife and patiently, determinedly, lovingly cut away.

Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it, that it may bear more fruit. Gospel of John 15:2