Pruning Season

Over the past three years, Brent and I have adopted three citrus trees because we absolutely adore home grown fruit. My favorite thing about our lemon and lime tree is they continuously bloom throughout the year, always yielding fragrant blossoms and a constant production of fruit. However, if you want a healthy tree that nourishes optimal lemons, limes, and oranges, you must prune your tree.

If you let it stay in an unmanicured state for the entirety of its life, will it still produce? Yes. But if you want your tree to reach its full potential, you must cut back some of the growth so that light can penetrate into the interior of the canopy.

At the beginning of January, our church held its week long fast, and I selfishly considered not participating. For once, I didn’t have anything specific I needed to seek God’s face about, and also, abstaining from food is HARD (and I do a modified version)!

But a week before the start date, God gave me a gentle nudging. How selfish of me to think I should skip the fast because I didn’t “need” anything. What if God wanted to talk to me about something not even on my radar? Would I be willing to sit heart wide open and receive whatever it may be he had to say?

I decided to commit, and man, did God talk to me the WHOLE week. He spoke through his Word. He spoke through sermons. He spoke through reading. He spoke through friends.

He. Spoke.

And to think I would have missed it all. All because of the false security that my tree is still producing fruit. I’m getting ready to close one of the largest chapters of my life in four short months and walk into an entirely new season. I have ideas and hopes of what this might entail, but honestly, I don’t completely know what he has for me. And even though I’ve already said “yes” to God regarding my next season, there’s some work to be done. He is calling for me to cut back some places, including people and habits, so my tree can reach its full potential. These friendships, habits, and behaviors might have served me well in one season, but what works in one season doesn’t necessarily work in the next.

Towards the end of the fast, he left me with this thought:

You are going to need to leave some things behind in this past season if you want your hands and arms empty enough to receive all that I have for you in the next.

Pruning.

If you’ve never pruned a tree, it requires muscle to complete the job. It’s neither easy nor fun. You might even end up with scratches. It will look and feel like you are clipping away something that is already healthy and producing. But as the arborist, you know what is best for the health of the tree, what will allow it to stand the test of time and do all that it was created to do.

So here’s to a year of pruning. It won’t be easy. It will seem counterintuitive at times. Some of it might be painful.

But, I trust the Arborist.