by Stefany J. Jones on Thursday, August 10, 2020, at 1:00 pm
There is nothing more challenging to go through in life than the pruning process. It never feels good, it’s sometimes bittersweet (depending on what’s being cut off), but is necessary for growth, beauty, and fruitfulness. It is amazing how different life looks from the “in your 40’s” window then all other looking glasses of your life. There is an unyielding amount of clarity that hindsight brings, and if you are not careful and securely grounded in WHO YOU ARE with a focus on WHO YOU ARE TO BECOME, what you discover through the looking glass can be devastating and lead to sadness, shame, and regret. However, WHEN you come to the understanding that the WHOLE ENTIRE YOU of who you are THIS DAY. It is filled with the ingredients of every little bits and piece of who you USED to be yesterday; you realize that every THING had its measure (whether great or small) in the savory recipe that makes up YOU.
The most profound statement I have found my Pastor RL Jackson to make, and the one I most closely identify with is this (and of course I’m paraphrasing because I can never seem to say precisely what he does… LOL) “…if you allow your yesterday to find its way into today, you have just killed your tomorrow”. My mantra is never to bring anything DEAD into what is ALIVE and THRIVING. When you bring your past pains, hurts, traumas, and regrets into your present, you are delivering what’s dead and gone into what should be thriving and poisoning it to the point of death without a yield. That is the premise and advantage of pruning. When trees are pruned, their dead is cut off so that preservation can occur. Likewise, in life, you must cut off the dead things, the offensive stuff, the stuff without yield, and fruitfulness (and yes, that also includes people as well) so that you can preserve what is alive and well on this inside of you. So that you can bare excellent fruit from your foliage. So that you can be all that you were destined to be in the first place.
We are never perfect, but we are certainly PERFECTED in our PURPOSE through the PRUNING PROCESS and believe you me, it was all a part of the PLAN from the very beginning. Now that you can take to the bank!
