Although I’m certainly no Master Gardener, I have gotten better in recent years about keeping plants alive. (I once killed a cactus, so any improvement is noteworthy!) I have an ivy that has survived for several years, and I’ve even pinched off some of its vines and re-rooted & potted them a few times. The ivy now has a few long, winding vines that I wrap around the pot in a leafy spiral.

Well, I learned something new this week. I noticed that a colleague had a potted ivy on her desk that was full and fluffy, not long and spiraled like mine. I asked her why hers looked so lush, and she said that the trick is to prune it and force the vine to grow upward, rather than outward. To think – all this time, I’ve been so proud of myself for simply keeping a plant alive and healthy, when it could have been even lusher and fuller!

Aren’t our spiritual lives like that, sometimes? We get stuck in a rut and keep on with the same ol’, same ol’ because it seems to be working ok, but we don’t make the effort to prune areas that need to grow. Maybe we don’t have outwardly obvious places that need to be plucked and clipped, like yellow leaves and dead spots, but if we were willing to let the ultimate Master Gardener prune us where he sees fit, then we could become even more impactful for the kingdom.

Romans 11:16-20 takes this idea to a whole new level. Our lives aren’t just pruned and repotted; if the kingdom of God could be described as a tree, then we’ve been completed grafted into it! Our life force is now “… a holy, God-planted, God-tended root. If the primary root of the tree is holy, there’s bound to be some holy fruit. Some of the tree’s branches were pruned and you wild olive shoots were grafted in” (v. 16-17, MSG).

If we are grafted into the Master Gardener’s tree, then we have nothing to fear from a little pruning by his loving hands. He wants our roots to dig deeply into his Word so that we can grow to our fullest capacity! Trust him with the changes he wants to make in your life.