When It Feels Like God Is Stripping Everything Away

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. – John 15:2

As I pulled into our driveway after church one Sunday last spring, I couldn’t help but notice the overflowing rose bushes in front of our house. Our front yard was looking pretty bare not even a month before, and now all of a sudden we had dozens of hot pink roses brightening up the landscape.

Taking in the beautiful sight of those roses, I remembered that those bushes weren’t always so big and fruitful. My mind flashed back to the end of the previous summer, right as we were moving into our new house in Northern Kentucky.

Our friends from church, Dan and Alison, had come to help us unload the U-Haul. Once we had finished unpacking the truck, Alison noticed the rose bushes. They looked dead to me at the time (although I know just as much about landscaping as I do about biochemistry or rocket science), so I was kind of surprised when she grabbed some clippers out of her car and started pruning the bushes.

“I was planning to just dig those up, Alison. You don’t have to worry about it. They don’t seem to have a whole lot of life left in them anyway,” I said with a doubt-filled tone.

But she smiled kindly and reassured me, “Actually, I think these might do pretty well if we just cut these branches back,” and she proceeded to prune what seemed like 80% of the rose bush.

I stood there skeptically, thinking there was no way those rose bushes were going to survive this. By the time Alison was done pruning, those bushes looked like a few knotty twigs sticking up awkwardly out of the ground – not exactly what I would picture as the beginnings of a big, blooming rose bush.

Gosh, was I wrong.

Alison clearly knew what she was doing. She knew exactly how much to prune and what to leave intact so that those bushes would produce a massive amount of hot pink roses. I doubted her, but she was right.

Is this scenario sounding familiar to anyone else?

Have you ever been in a situation where it seemed like God was pruning you down to what felt like nothing? Did it seem like He was cutting away so many different parts of your life to the point where your life felt started to feel bare? Have you ever wondered if you were going to survive a pruning season, much less see a harvest bloom later on?

I know I’ve felt that way…more than once. There have been plenty of times in my life when I didn’t understand why God was stripping certain things away or cutting certain things out, and I started to doubt that He actually knew what He was doing.

But then some time passed, because after all, nothing grows in an instant, does it? And as time went on, growth started happening. What had once felt like a life of barrenness was now a life of fruitfulness. I didn’t feel like those awkward twigs sticking out of the ground anymore. I was starting to see the “roses” bloom, and out of nowhere, the pruning started to make a little more sense.

Friend, I don’t know where you are in the pruning process right now. Maybe you’re in the midst of God pruning you down to the twigs (I know, it’s not fun.) Or maybe you’re starting to see a few blooms. Or, maybe your life feels like my rose bushes looked in front of my house last spring, big and fruitful and gorgeous. 

Wherever you are, I hope you choose to trust God’s methods and His timing for each stage of the process. I hope you remember that He knows what He’s doing, even when it feels like He’s getting a little carried away with the pruning shears. And I hope you believe that what is to come will be worth all of the pruning it takes to get there.