Pruning

I weeded my flower beds last week and pulled so many flipping weeds.
I finally borrowed Sharen's trimmers yesterday so I could cut the dead parts off my roses. Once I was done with that I went over the rest of the beds again.
There was one plant that the dead stuff was hiding underneath. As I was lifting the green up to get to the brown dead branches I wondered how long this plant had been dying.
You see I've been neglecting my poor flower beds. I haven't been watering them at all.

I snipped and snipped. I yanked and pulled the dead branches and leaves until I thought I would be killing the plant I was pruning it back so hard. I had to cut off some of the green because the brown was part of the same branch.
I don't know if the plant will make it. I might just have prolonged its life a little bit without really saving it.
I also found that several of my weeds had sprung back to life. Not even 3 days had passed and it was like I hadn't pulled them at all.

There were other plants. Seedum (I think) and another flower plant that had spread so wide it was choking out my roses and my Japanese Maple. My roses and Japanese Maple are the plants I want the most in my beds. They're my first choice and I was ignoring them and letting all these other plants choke them out. The other plants are still lovely. They're still pretty. They're still just fine, but they aren't my first choice and by not keeping them in check I was slowly suffocating my first choices.

I saw a lot of my life in that flower bed.

Ben talked about sowing and reaping this week. He talked about how the delay between the sowing and the reaping causes us to disconnected from the consequences to our actions. He talked about how we seem to be told that the moment we do something sinful we think we'll immediately be trust into the pit of hell, when really the reaping can take a very long time to show up. It can take so long to show up that we think we're getting away free and clear and we're so deep into the pit by the time the consequences show up we can't see the top.

Like the plant that was green on top and almost completely dead on the bottom I can be dying for a long time before the pain starts showing itself in my relationships or my acknowledged emotions. Sometimes the death can attach itself to perfectly good and healthy things that end up having to be pruned even though they're not bad or deadly.

Like the seedum and the other plant choking out my Japanese Maple and roses I let things that aren't as important, that aren't my first choice for my life take over. I ignore them for a little bit and they multiply and begin to crowd out those things that I want to be first place in my life. Things that aren't really bad, they aren't really terrible, they're just not what should be first.

TV that seems enjoyable distracting me from spending time reading the bible.

Filling my schedule with appointments and activities that are fun but they aren't building relationships that I want to build or allowing me healthy time to rest and re-charge

Eating eating eating until I feel sick and disgusting when I should be eating in moderation and eating things that are fueling this body instead of weighing it down and paralyzing it.

Like the weeds I've been snipping and pulling, yanking and hacking away at my own weeds. Wounds that I've been wanting to close for good, memories and voices I've been trying to purge from my head keep springing back up. They've been springing up with such an increased speed lately. Because I just cut at the surface. I don't pull it out by the root.
I have to pull these things out of my heart by the root or they will just keep sprouting up.

Because I haven't been watering my flower beds and I haven't been drinking fully from the well that is so readily available to me.

So I'm asking for help, not only asking for help, I'm accepting help to climb out of this pit and it's going to start with sowing today. Sowing things that may not keep the weeds and 2nd choices away right away, but they will one day.

It's time to prune. But I've let it go so far I can't do it on my own anymore. Because this pruning might hurt, it might feel like it's killing me, which is why I've avoided it for so long. But I'm hanging on to the knowledge that cutting off the dead in me will only allow the living in me to flourish.