For before the harvest, when the blossom is over, and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he cuts off the shoots with pruning hooks, and the spreading branches he lops off and clears away.
Isaiah 18:5
At the beginning of October, I did some major pruning and weeding in my garden to get everything ready for wintering over.
It's therapeutic, getting down in the dirt among my flowers, cutting away what is dead, pulling the weeds out, and cleaning up -- preparing.
Because when spring returns, so will the flowers blossoming and the green things blooming out -- and I have to make ready now so they will have a fertile place to thrive when the time is right.
Life is exactly like that sometimes -- a place of pruning and more pruning, of cutting back and tearing out, of preparing with the hope that someday there will be a spring.
And there are times that this season can seem everlasting, full of more painful pruning and weeding than you ever thought you would need, and the grief of it can take hold and threaten to overwhelm everything else in your life.
But that is the time to remember ... that the place of pruning and weeding and tearing out is always a place of preparation.
Preparation that submitted to will bring forth a beautiful spring in God's perfect time. A time when we too will be able to THRIVE.
in the place of pruning where the pain has taken hold, the joy is hard to grasp and it feels like the ache inside is all there is to life anymore --
remember God's gracious promise of a spring. If not here, than surely an eternal and everlastingly joyful one in His presence if we hold on to the promise to the end.
Where He will be the light -- and the pain will be gone forever -- and the pruning will have a joyful end.
Come, Lord Jesus.
..........
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
John 10:10
