Pruning

Off and on for the past week I have been pruning the rose bushes in the back yard.  They have beat me up!  I am scratched, poked, and tired.  The rose bushes are looking pretty beat up themselves but way less wild and much smaller.  I can't wait to see the completed end result.  There was so much dead stuff under the roses I actually have put in a cumulative 7 hours into the rose bushes and I am still not done.  The weather keeps preventing me from completing them. 

As I was pruning and found all the dead stuff I thought about myself as a person and how God is constantly having to prune me.  At some points I had to cut away living stuff because it have grown wild and the rose bush had entangled itself into another one and I was unable to get to the dead stuff underneath.  They were killing each other not allowing any sun to the others.  There had also began some rot on several branches and some roots.  I cut off the dead branches and pulled out the plants with the rotted roots.  Isn't this just what God does with us?  He prunes us of our bad habits, actions, thoughts, and sometimes he even pulls out the parts that are living sometimes because they are over extending us and not allowing us to focus on what we need to or sometimes even not allowing someone else near us to shine.  I do believe that sometimes we take on to much and God says woah pull back some because he knows we need a break and he has the perfect person to take over.  I think that in all things we need to relax more and when things come along or are taken away from us we need to look to God because everything comes from him.


(I just found this post hiding out in my drafts section from over a year ago. I'm just posting it in it's rawness and leaving it as it is.)