Timber.....

Many years ago, the Employment Plus scheme that is situated right next door to my corps came up with a brillant scheme of planting christmas trees to be harvested and sold to raise some money. A great idea! Somewhere along the way, perhaps due to changing staff members, these trees were forgotten about. There was no harvest, there was no selling, there was no money. Instead these trees were left to simply grow....and grow they did. They kept growing until they became a forrest of very tall trees.

So last year I arrived to the corps and one of the things we did early on was have a working bee to try and clean up the "forrest". It had become a great place to drink and discard the empty bottles it would seem. A neighbourhood watch meeting had been called by the residents whose properties backed onto ours.

Later in the year we had a really strong wind storm. One young woman actually lost her life when she was struck by a falling tree near the university. It was really windy!!! One of the beloved Christmas trees decided it wanted to "lie down" and proceeded to crash through the fence at employment plus. This was a blessing. You see had it fallen sideways it would have gone crashing right through one of our 40 retirement units, doing serious damage to the property and perhaps the person living there. So something had to be done. The trees were far too unstable to stay....even though they looked great.

Much discussion and debate took place. I love trees and while I didnt really like the idea that we would have to chop them down, I liked the idea of losing residents even less.

So on Thursday the sound of chainsaws and bulldozers could be heard as the Christmas trees finally came down.

It got me thinking about how a great idea left undone became a problem and how a tree left unpruned became a danger to others.

As much as I don't like being pruned, it is necessary for proper growth. The problem with those christmas trees is that their roots system was not stable enough to hold the height they had grown to. I need to make sure I have strong roots in Christ in order to support and nurture my growth, otherwise when the storms of life come.....I'll crash into a fence or worse yet.....hurt someone along the way.

So today I choose to embrace the pruning of God, to enable me to grow tall AND strong in him