We have four apple trees in our backyard. Years ago they produced a bounty of red, but this year I can count the number of apples on one hand. At least this year there ARE a few apples. We didn't know anything about apple trees when we moved here, and so we didn't know about pruning. When we did finally prune the trees, we cut them back too far, and I feared we had killed them. They didn't bear fruit after that. So I quit pruning them altogether.This year the trees grew with a vengeance, and in the spring the branches were laden with promising white flowers. But the apples never came. And when I looked through the tangle of branches to the center of the trunk, I saw that the trees were dying inside. While the outside of the tree was heavy with green growth, the center was becoming brown and dead, and the branches couldn't get the food they needed.
I see now why pruning is necessary. I let the trees have too much of a good thing, and now there are so many branches that the center of the tree cannot get the light or nourishment it needs. With all those branches to feed, bearing fruit is almost impossible. I must prune the trees regularly and make sure I cut away just enough but not too much. And sometimes that means cutting away the good branches to let the light in. Too many good branches means not enough fruit.
I am amazed at how God keeps using those trees to show me my life. This time last year I was emerging from a season of craziness and chaos and too-much-ness, and I spent 31 days writing about abiding. That was a season of pruning followed by so much growth. And yet now here I am again, emerging from another summer just like the previous one, with so many branches I am trying to feed that I sometimes feel like I am dying in the center. I can take on so many things and make it look from the outside that I am thriving, but at my core I am starved for sunlight. And I don't have what it takes to truly bear fruit. Thank goodness for a Gardner who knows just what to do when the tree will let Him. Sometimes the pruning is the cutting away of dead things. But sometimes the pruning is cutting back the tangled mess of growth to allow the good things to thrive. To keep me from choking and dying from the inside out.
And we have the choice to come to Him or not, because we are more than just trees; we are His beloved. I find myself back at this lesson on abiding all over again, and that's OK, because I want to remember how to rest. How to be still. How to be filled with His love instead of with my own drive to constantly do, to find my significance in things that only choke the life away.
I can rest because I can believe.
He is good. Always. And coming back to Him always reminds me that I am right where I want to be. I just have to stay there.
