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A bit-o-trim, here and there. Take o some dead wood. Carefully lop that branch, just enough. Spring and summer, never a welcome chore to these hands. e voice, though, spoke to me regularly: this tree, that bush, these limbs MUST GO. Purposeful procrastination bought time but ultimately the time had come. Those cuts likely hurt me worse than the vegetation, though the cuts were necessary.
I was never a parent, lest you count some cats or perhaps those parakeets I had when I was a kid. I suppose I’d have made a less than satisfactory one as I’m not so good at correction. If I cannot tame an unruly maple, how would I tackle a child’s tantrum? Maybe if I were in those shoes, it would all come to me.
My Dad had to correct me a few times (a few!) Certainly, it might have hurt at the time, not physically but mentally (never did he pull o that belt,) But looking back my feelings are positive. He saw me doing wrong and worked to steer me right, even if it might have hurt him at the time. ere are some trees along the yard’s edge that I’ve let go of for so long that they’ll never be right. Their destiny now is to go o in the wrong direction or die. I can do nothing else with them now. So it is with a parent: they can spend 18 years shaping that child at which point the pruning, or lack of it, is there for all to see. I’ve seen what happens when a parent fails, and I’m positive you have as well.
I picture our heavenly Father, watching each of us carefully. He sees where we are going wrong, and where we have strengths. He can see the big picture: He can see us fully grown, perfectly formed, reaching for the sky. It must hurt him so to see us putting all our e orts to go le when we should go right. O times He reaches down, and He redirects our path, and what do we do? We curse and we cry. We want to go OUR way. And if we insist? We can tell the gardener to leave us alone; He will, no doubt with a tear in his eye, leave us alone forever. Rather than someday living in the King’s garden, where it is ever Spring, where our roots dip into where the gentle water ever flows, where the Son ever shines...rather than that, we will find our tangled branches facing that long, long winter, that everlasting drought, that storm without rain, that re that never ceases.
