The arborists came out to our home yesterday to prune the Blue Feather Cypress trees and the Ginkgo. Another team came to remove so many dead limbs from two enormous oak trees.
As I left my house for campus, I passed by two experts working right by the driveway. I watched who made the first cut into the cypress tree. One knelt; the other observed. Then they stood back, hands on their chins, assessing. They discussed. They gently examined the next limb. With the next cut, they repeated the process, all the way up the tree. What I noticed most involved the intense discussion after each cut.
I imagine they stayed for hours. When I returned home late in the afternoon, the trees had their perfect shape, their perfect height, and their perfect look. I thought of God pruning our lives. With every cut, He deliberately and thoughtfully knows what He’s doing in our lives.
The Ginkgo enjoyed all the pruning to keep it growing tall and strong. But I learned we now must stake it for a year to direct the growth against its current inclination. It’s that holding in place, that tightly bound situation that, at least in our own lives, we tend to resist. When God stakes us down somewhere for our own good, it’s to keep us right. It’s to keep us going in the right direction. Otherwise, as the expert warned, the tree will destroy itself, toppling under its own wrong bent.
I submit to the pruning and staking. I submit to every cut.