Dead or alive..

I don’t know about you but sometimes, I get discouraged. I can’t see any good fruit in aspects of my life but then God reminds me of the deep work that he’s doing in Me. That the Spirit of God lives in me and I am made alive in Jesus Christ, but some of the dead wood in my life, in my thinking and actions needs to be pruned, removed and cut back. I’m a follower of Jesus on a discipleship journey who is always learning. Some lessons for me take a bit longer to learn…

There is a climbing plant that sits in a large pot outside of the main front door to our home. It had always been very healthy and green and produced beautiful flowers but this year went brown, brittle and to my eye was withered and completely dead.

I had left it for months because I really liked this plant, hoping it would revive, but the time came when action was needed. If you came to our door you couldn’t help but notice this withered, brown and barren dry climber. There were no green shoots or flowers. It looked completely dead. I had to remove it. No options left.

I started cutting it right back. It was a big job as the plant had climbed right up the trellis over the years. As I kept cutting back some of the stalks were completely dead but then I noticed that some of the dry stalks at the very ends of the climber still had some green in their middle. There was still some signs of life, albeit small in the plant.

I cut the plant right back to some small brown stalks but then decided not to completely remove and replace the plant but wait and see if those “signs of life” would come to anything.

I watered the plant, gave it some plant food and waited. And waited. For a couple of weeks nothing happened. It was still just some brown stumps. Then one day I noticed a small green shoot, then another. I can’t tell you how excited and happy I was. Crazy isn’t it to get so excited about a plant but I was really, really inexplicably happy. I kept pointing it out to my husband (whose initial enthusiasm started to wane) as every day I was checking its progress.

What had been dead to my eye from looking at the outside still had life in some of those branches and there was clearly still life in the roots. In that hidden part that I couldn’t see. The roots were not dead. Once the dead parts of the plant were cut away, once some nourishment was given, that plant started to produce again.

Praise God…He teaches us lessons every day.