Pruning Oops

Pruning: The art of cutting branches in the right place at the right time to promote good growth.

While gardening is not my thing, fortunately for me it is my husband’s thing. So although I understand nearly zilch about making a backyard pretty, I get to enjoy a pretty backyard with perennials that showcase a variety of colors at different times throughout the summer and fall.

I am not a gardener, but I am quite helpful. This year, however, I learned I am not so much a helpful gardener. Let me confess why.

Pruning perennials happens most intensely in the fall at our house. We cut back plants to protect them from winter so they are ready to shoot out of the ground in the spring. Last fall, my husband was away one weekend and I decided to pretend I was a helpful garden.

In my defense, my husband had taught me to prune this and that the summer before, arming me with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. At the same time, I had spent many months in discernment about how my life had become overgrown in some areas. I was as determined to prune the backyard as I had been pruning away at the busy in my life.

Looking back, this is clearly a dangerous collusion.

I pruned it all. Everything. Every perennial that had grown I pruned to the ground, with almost no exceptions. The grapevine my husband had been tending for a few years did not see it coming. I pruned it all, making the fence it had clung to naked and confused.

My husband lost a breath when he saw my “helpful” gardening, but because he has more grace than concern about his backyard, he said something like, “Thank you. Next year we can do this together.”

Grapevines should not be pruned each year. Some of the perennials I pruned can fend for themselves over the winter and should have been left alone.

All these things I know now!

Perennials, like life itself, demand constant pruning. The gift of your life is not to be wasted, taken for granted, or left to grow out of control. God has given you life “that truly is life” (1 Timothy 6:19), and that life requires sitting with God, the wisest pruner of all, and wondering what to cut back and what to let grow.

Just don’t go after it alone with a Felco Pruning Shears, or you might prune the wrong things, like the grapes. Now we have to wait patiently for new growth, which indeed is coming. Even pruning oops can be redeemed by the God who grows abundantly life now and always, particularly in you.