in the fury of the moment

the hands of the pruner

There are days that I feel like I want to be in a job where I am moving and shaking, where there is an obvious need, and I am obviously meeting it. I want to feel like I'm doing something or feel like I'm affecting someone or just FEELING in general.

Then there are days that I long to do nothing more than sit at a table in a coffee shop with a pen and a notebook and watch people as I sip white mochas all day long (ok, maybe just one white mocha, then regular coffee ... otherwise I would have quite the tummyache). I would sip, watch, and write ... then think and sip again and write some more. It would be a day filled with words and faces, and I wouldn't want to get up from my chair lest I miss a moment of it.

This morning really felt like a day that would fit well into the second category. I woke up to gray skies, and I just felt completely wiped out for some reason. I couldn't even drag myself out of bed early to pray, so I just laid in bed for about 30 minutes and gazed off through the semi-open window blinds. I didn't sleep, I didn't even close my eyes ... I just stared off into the distance, hoping that if I stayed there long enough the day would pass me by without notice.

Finally, I faced the inevitable and pulled myself out of bed. I stumbled through the morning, consuming coffee like it was going out of style (does that phrase even make sense?). I had pretty much written the day off as a big "eh" when I was asked to stop my work in the office and instead go to the greenhouse to work on some plants.

For the four following hours I pruned plants. That may sound incredibly tedious or mind-numbing to you, but to me it was wonderful. As I snipped away at flowers and leaves, I felt God's presence more strongly than I have in a while. I heard His voice in the chirping of the birds that somehow snuck into the greenhouse. I smelled His fragrance in the strong aroma that surrounded me as I snipped back leaves off the mint plants. And as I examined the tiny blossoms of the flowers between my fingers, I saw the awesome masterwork of His plan. It all blended together in a way that made me smile. I think I probably scared off at least a couple nursery customers today, as I grinned and pruned and trimmed and chuckled. But it was just all so perfectly orchestrated with the thoughts that have been running through this head of mine.

When I first got out to the greenhouse and began my pruning, I was holding back so much. The first plants I pruned were exploding with pretty blue flowers. They were beautiful, and I almost winced as I sliced through the stems with my pruning shears. But I knew that they had to be trimmed and cleaned up. The old beauty had to be removed so that a new, greater beauty could come through. To just look at the flowers, I would have thought they were fine. But because of my small amount of plant knowledge (and also because my boss told me to), I knew that I had to trim the plants down so that they could grow thicker and with more blooms. When I stepped back from a finished flat of flowers, I couldn't help but feel a little sad to see that all of the pretty blue flowers were gone. In their place sat a flat of simple green stems with some leaves. I had to remind myself that the end result will be worth it.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. The last few months of my life have found me in the hands of the Master Gardener. He has been pruning away the branches and flowers in my life. For a while I had thought it was pretty enough that it could just stay that way. But He knows that the end result is worth it all, and He trims and prunes as He sees fit (with hands much more careful than mine were today). The flowers are beginning to grow back now, and my life is taking a new shape. It has been hard (and not so pretty), but it has been good. And I look forward to the end result that only He knows.

posted by Krista @ 10:51 PM