Pruning the burning bush
I work with an awesome landscaping company. The other day started off with pruning a bush to the highest level of perfection and the day ended with a jewish man explaining the mysteries of our amazing Father.
So, the morning began with me taking my lovely motorized hedge-trimmer and shaping a simple looking bush (shown in the picture above) at the head of a clients driveway. I, myself, am no professional pruning but am able to get the job done. When I asked Mark, the professional pruner, to join me and stare in awe of my newest masterpiece he snatched (literally) the trimmer out of my hand, held down on the throttle and cut the bush in half! With my mouth hanging open I just stood there as he handed the trimmer back to me with a huge grin saying “make that look beautiful!” Over the next forty-five minutes I was able to grasp a little more of the concept of “pruning”. The definition of pruning means that you trim away the dead wood to expand the life of whatever you are pruning. Mark OBVIOUSLY didn’t know anything about pruning a bush, because you can’t make ANYthing beautiful by first making it “look” hideous… or does the fact that he has thirty years of pruning under his belt actually mean something? And little did I know that the bush I was working with was no ordinary hedge. This one is known very simply as a burning bush, and the more you prune it the better it grows! Let me explain…
You could actually take a full grown (there is no such thing, but for the sake of making a point we’ll just say there is) burning bush, cut it down to grown level, throw the branches in a pile over the stomp and in six months it would be fully grown again. But since that wouldn’t leave you with much to look at for most of the summer here in the north you will give it something almost as intense, a near death! A “near death” is a gardening term used to say, prune it to the point of death, but leave enough life in it so that it will grow anew. And little did I know that my so called “perfect” job before Mark came along was a HUGE waste of time. I should have cut the bush in half long before and cut out all the inner branches too. I honestly thought this guy was insane, by the time I was done with these bushes there were about half a dozen limbs left on each (again, in comparison to the picture above!)… Mark took time to share with me about the “nature” of the plant and why it is necessary for us to give it a sudden death every few years. Too often the bushes would become unkept and they would become wild and untamed, so we’d have to come along, after the owner asked and we’d tear the place up and within weeks the place never looked so great.
You see, with pruning, if you only make it look nice from the outside it will end up getting out of control to the point where only the outer layer of branches is of any worth, while the other 80% of it is completely dead on the inside. We are living, breathing burning bushes, aren’t we? We some times get taken through times of “near death”’s. I am not saying that whenever this happens it means our lives weren’t properly lived, but what I am saying is that our God, the best of all gardeners, chooses to bring the best of beauty out of pruning away the deadwood in us. We may think, seeing with our own eyes, that we’re beautiful and just the right shape, etc. But the truth is that 80% (or more) of our lives are dead or could become even better. It looks like we’re growing, but we only look good on the outside, and when you look on the inside we’re simply full of uselessness. The interesting thing about a burning bush is that if you were to let it grow without ever trimming it to “a near death”, it would eventually choke itself… to death. Strange, isn’t it? If someone doesn’t keep pruning it to near death every now and again it will eventually die because of its “growth”.
How often does God take you through a near death? More often than not, probably. We can have skewed perspectives from our point of view. If we look at David for example we see that when he faced Goliath it wasn’t about how huge he was from David’s perspective, but how small he was in the Fathers eyes. We look much to often through the wrong lens. This comes from Adam and Eve’s choice to discern between good and evil. We take on our own responsibilities to discern between the good and evil that goes on around us. We think that every “near death” comes from our sin or the devils war against our lives when it could very well be God trying to keep you alive in the first place. To purify gold it has to undergo intense heat to bring out the grime that is within it. So when we ask God to purify our hearts, like gold, we are asking for a near death.
Let our prayer be that we’ll see with the eyes of the Father and trust in HIS goodness.