I have said that 2020 was a year of pruning for me.
The funny thing about that is I have never touched a real set of pruning shears, until today.
We have some hibiscus bushes in the front of our house, which we bought almost 2 years ago. According to my neighbor, these bushes have probably never been trimmed in the 7 years the house has been here. So I decided that today was the day, and since I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to gardening, I took myself to YouTube and looked up how to do it.
As I began to snip away at a few scraggly branches, I felt extremely hesitant.
Many branches had some green on them, some had flowers blooming on the ends. But according to the hibiscus-pruning expert on YouTube, those branches needed to go. Why? Because flowers can only bloom from new growth. Without pruning, much of the plant would remain bare.
I started thinking about the past year, and the pruning I have felt happening in my own life. It was through this physical act of actually pruning the plants in my yard that I was able to truly recognize the significance of pruning in my life.
It can be scary. Cutting away remnants of what once was, and what still holds bits of life and beauty. It can be awkward, even ugly. (I mean, I have some scary looking hibiscus plants in my front yard now, and I’m genuinely a bit concerned about their survival.) Which leads me to the third realization I had in my pruning adventures today…
Sometimes, death is what opens the door for new life to enter in.
I don’t think that our hibiscus plants are going to die. I hope not, anyway. But if they do, they will surely be replaced with something else. And if they don’t, new blooms will burst to life from where old limbs were cut away. Regardless, both death and life occur in the pruning process.
My family faced a lot of death this past year, both literally and metaphorically. The greatest losses being my dad and my mother-in-law, passing away just a few months apart. Actual death of a loved one brings a weight of grief that feels as though nothing good could ever come from it. But there is also gratitude – for the time spent with them when they were here, and for the ability to grieve over the love and the time shared with them. There is life. And hope. There is the faith and knowledge that this world is not our home, and we will see our loved ones again. They have merely traveled ahead, their journeys leading ours. Until then, we can embrace the life we have remaining here.
And we can trust that God has a plan through it all.
I’ve also lost 2 jobs this past year, both of which I truly loved doing. My kids lost many of their extracurricular activities. We have barely seen any family or friends in 10 months. But in the midst of all the loss, we have gained so much more family time than we could have ever imagined possible. Before last March, we had all been running ragged, being pulled in a gazillion different directions, rarely spending time together as a family. We had been forced to slow down and embrace our time together at home. It was a difficult change at first, but we have grown so much closer as a family as a result. And for that, I am so thankful.
So while pruning may not feel (or look) very good as it is happening, I am confident that beautiful things will grow as a result.
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