I was cutting the grass tonight, as there was a break in the torrential rains we have been having for the last two weeks. (No ark yet, but there's more rain in the forecast!) I love to cut the grass. I think it's because it's the chore I had at home when I was in high school, and it reminds me of Dad. I still cut the grass methodically, just like he taught me. Neat geometrical shapes, straight lines, just like Dad would have done it. Cutting as close as I can to the trees without hitting them. Yes, I have some obsessive/compulsive details to sort out. It also effects the way I pack the refrigerator after grocery shopping, how I load the dishwasher and the way clothes are placed in the dresser drawers. As I mowed around my rectangles, I wondered if he could see me, and if my lines looked as straight from his vantage point as they did from mine. Probably not. After all, he is surrounded by perfection...and I have to settle for a fallen earth for now.
I finished the lawn, and drove the mower to the front yard where Luis was pruning our little maple tree. The builder planted our tree, and the two other maples at the houses next door and down the road, all around the same time. For some reason, however, ours hasn't grown as much as the neighboring trees have. Luis watered it faithfully while it was young. We have kept the kids from hanging on it's branches. Last spring, our next door neighbor put mulch around his tree. It seemed to really make it grow a good bit. So, a while back, we bought some mulch for our tree. Nothing.
I drove up to Luis and asked him why he was cutting so much off of our already small tree and he said something that struck a chord inside of me. He said, "I am pruning some branches off the bottom to let the air get more inside the tree." Huh. That made me think. We had spent so much time adding things to the tree, thinking that was what it needed. We even tried copying our neighbors to see if that would help. But maybe instead of adding to the tree, what it really needed was a little pruning and thinning out. So, as usual when I am doing yard work, I looked for the spiritual correlation in my little maple. As Christians, many times we look at our own lives and we don't feel like we are growing and flourishing. We look around us, and compare our lives to others that we see and we just don't seem to measure up. We may try to do more, only to fall short when we come to the end of the day. Often times, we try to be someone else, imitate what they do, in hopes that we will have the same results as that person does. We forget that, like each of the trees, we are all unique with our own purpose and plan for our life. But many times we just end up fooling ourselves. Sometimes the solution is not adding more to the problem, but rather evaluating what we have, and seeing what needs to be cut away. Maybe we have packed our lives so tightly with what we believe is supposed to help us, that the wind of the Spirit can't reach us and flow freely through those areas that are full of our own desires and selfish ambitions. Maybe there really are times where less is more, and if we allow God to prune our life sucking areas away, then we will grow and flourish like we were made to.
Well, I can't judge our maple's growth by one day of pruning, but I have this sneaky suspicion that our tree is going to start to grow like never before. Not because we decided to throw one more thing on the tree or the ground around it, but because of what we decided to take away. One day, when I am able to sit under the huge shade of our once small tree, I hope I will remember the lesson that it taught me today.
