Pruning
My garden looks bare. It is so bare that it is slightly depressing. What ended last season as a lush and beautiful area is now scraggly; the proportions are all completely off.
Why? Because I just split up the plants. The hostas. My family spent the weekend, spade shovels in hand, dividing up these plants. I learned years ago how necessary this task was. But it wasn’t a lesson I enjoyed learning.
Years ago, I got a job on the grounds crew not because I knew anything about working in gardens but, because they were hiring. And we needed money.
So, that first fall we got a work order to go to all gardens on the seminary campus and cut the leaves off the plants a couple inches above ground level. It felt wrong. These were thick, gorgeous plants in shades of blue and green that I hadn’t seen before. It also wasn’t very late in the fall, and it felt premature. But, doing my job, I got the blades, and cut them all down. I will admit, I felt really guilty. There was nothing wrong with them, why cut them down?
Then, to my surprise, after we were all done, we got another work order directing us to go to specific hostas that we had just decapitated and split them, some of them into six different pieces. I didn’t understand either the mechanics of that nor the reason.
After being taught that I had to get a spade shovel and split it right down the middle of the root ball, I quietly went about my job.
Later that day, I asked my boss Dennis why this was necessary. He patiently taught me that hostas are great, but they get way too big way too fast. When that happens, they can’t breathe. They don’t use water efficiently, they can even start dying off from the inside out. You have to thin them out not only for their own good, but for the good of the soil.
We see this sort of progression in our own human lives in strange sorts of ways. If we aren’t careful, we see parts of our lives that aren’t inherently bad start to creep out of control.
I think we all know someone who suffers lifestyle creep, that situation where an increase in income leads to more and more toys and obligations and then all of the sudden, they are spending money they don’t have just to maintain an appearance.
Or the creep of time obligations. We say ‘yes’ to so many things without realizing that we haven’t been spending enough (or any) time with our friends and we’ve lost touch.
Or the creep of work or other pursuits that infringes upon our faith life, our prayer life; causes us to not remember the last time we did something meaningful with family.
Sometimes we need to thin things out, to let ourselves breathe again, to get healthy.
Jesus once said that the branches that are already bearing fruit are the ones that get pruned. Not the dead ones. The healthy ones.
I didn’t understand that at the time. Standing there with a shovel, looking at a plant that seemed perfectly fine, it felt unnecessary — maybe even a little destructive.
But as I learned, the problem wasn’t that the plant was unhealthy. It was that it had grown to the point where it could no longer sustain itself as it was. It needed space. It needed to breathe.
And sometimes, so do we.
It is a delicate balance we are all called to live, and we can easily get pulled in too many directions with too many things to juggle. Sometimes we will get it right and sometimes we will say we did our best.
What is keeping you from slowing down to breathe? What is crowding you in and keeping you from full life?
