By Rev. Deanna Woodward
Maple Leaf Parish –
United Methodist Churches
of Cherry Grove, Fountain,
Preston and Spring Valley
Several years ago I toured a garden where massive pumpkins were grown – the type people grow to compete for a prize. Remember that old rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. Had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell. And there he kept her very well.” Well, the pumpkins in this garden were big enough to live in.
An author named Mike Michalowicz, wrote a book entitled The Pumpkin Plan, offering some lessons for small businesses from the practices of a pumpkin farmer. Some secrets the author shared were:
1.Plant promising seeds.
2.Water, water, water.
3.As they grow, routinely remove all of the diseased or damaged pumpkins.
4.Weed like a mad dog. Not a single leaf or root permitted if it isn’t a pumpkin plant.
5.When they grow larger, identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins. Then remove all the less promising pumpkins. Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.
6.Focus all of your attention on the big pumpkin. Nurture it like a baby, and guard it like you would your first Mustang convertible.
7.Watch it grow. In the last days of the season, this will happen so fast you actually can see it happen.
You can draw your own conclusions about how these rules relate to small businesses, but when it comes to growing in the Christian life, Jesus said “I am the vine, you are the branches. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me…for apart from me you can do nothing.”
God is the gardener, the cultivator of our lives. God chooses the best site for us and tends us as we grow. The vines can’t weed themselves, nor mulch, prune, irrigate, spray, fertilize, cultivate, graft – the gardener must do all that. And we need God’s tending for our growth also. How many times have you been aware of God weeding thorny situations from your path, mulching the soil of your life with nurturing relationships and cultivating good influences in your life? Even when we feel ourselves being “pruned,” God can work through it to help us grow. In fact, pruning is necessary to grow the best possible harvest.
So if we feel ourselves being snipped or pinched in one place – maybe hurt by someone else’s thoughtless words or actions – God could use this experience to help us grow in sensitivity and the ability to forgive. Sometimes an unnecessary distraction or self-centered diversion has been lopped off, and we’ve learned to focus on greater priorities. Or if we’re nipped by illness, we may grow in our ability to draw on patience and faith that we never knew we had. Pruning sometimes lays our needs bare, so that we allow others to minister to us and develop closer and deeper relationships. Sometimes when it seems like a door of opportunity has slammed shut for us, we’ve found another one opening, and this pruning has helped us find our true calling, where we could bear the most fruit.
There have probably been times in both your life and mine when we could look back and realize that a particular pruning was a blessing, enabling us to bear more and better fruit. There have probably been other prunings when we still can’t see what good came out of them. But whatever our feelings, we can trust God to make things come out right as we keep abiding in the vine.
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