For a bloke who hates gardening I seem to end up doing a lot of it… I guess you could say I married the wrong girl if I wanted a gardening free life!

The last couple of weeks have seen me slowly shift most of the ridiculous mound of mulch that was dumped on our verge (around 15 cubic metres) and then prune so many trees that we filled two front verges with the branches. I did get to buy and wield a chainsaw yesterday and that was somewhat satisfying to the my blokey needs.

Now we have cut some trees back and stripped others virtually naked. Apparently this is good for them…

All that stuff in the Bible about God pruning us so that we will be fruitful make a little more sense when you do this stuff. I guess if he has a shape that he hopes our life will take and we are open to his pruning then perhaps we will turn out better than if we just ‘grow wild’.

I’m not much of a greenie, but it’s hard not to cut a stack of branches off a tree and imagine it doesn’t cause pain. One tree even ‘bled’.

Perhaps I’m odd but I enjoy God’s ‘pruning’, not in the sense that it gives pain, but from the view that it shows he is there and he is concerned for the shape my life is taking. And usually ‘pruning’ is noticeable and significant rather than incremental. Again it’s good to be aware of the presence of God in my life and be consciously choosing to respond to that, because let’s face it – many days, weeks and months can come and go with little noticeable activity, but once God gets out the chainsaw then it’s hard to ignore.