The problem of postponed pruning...

Around the end of February of this year, a neighbour passing in the street knocked on my window and said to me, "You should prune that jasmine plant soon... or it won't be strong enough by the time summer comes." Sure enough, I remembered I'd once been told that you should completely prune back your jasmine tree in autumn or at least by January, so that it will regrow and be covered in fragrant blossoms by the time May or June arrives. So I got out the secateurs and pruned it back right away (see photo) but the months went by and I have to confess that it did seem to be growing more slowly than it did last year. By May there were only a few blossoms, and it was already July before we could enjoy that wonderful jasmine fragrance every time we came in or out of our front door. The perfume is beautiful now.... but the blossoms are still a little fewer than they were last year. I guess I waited too long to do the pruning.


There's a well known Bible passage (John's gospel chapter 15) about pruning. The passage says that our lives are like a vine and God is like the gardener. For our own good, He will remove any branches that are simply sapping our strength and not bearing fruit..... but verse two says that He will also prune the branches that do bear fruit - in order that they can be even more fruitful. Sometimes we resist God's pruning work in our lives; perhaps we're afraid of losing things that we care about or that we've grown used to; perhaps we're afraid that the pruning will expose our ugliness (like the bare branches above in the photo I took of my jasmine plant in February.) But the end result of pruning is always that there will be more blossoms, more fragrance, more fruit from our lives.


I've learned a lesson from the postponed pruning of my jasmine: if we resist God's pruning and are slow to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our lives, if we delay the process of having the old branches and blossoms cut off.... just perhaps we will have a little less fruit, a little less fragrance that year than if we had responded promptly and willingly to the Father's hopes and dreams for our life. It reminds me of a principle that I wrote in my journal back when I was a teenager: delayed obedience is actually disobedience. My prayer is that I will always be quick to respond to the Gardener's prompting in my life and that I won't resist the pruning until it's a little too late.