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Pruning Out The Dead Wood

I remember a preacher once saying that experience is not necessarily a good teacher – it’s a hard teacher. Well this year, I learned something the hard way.

When we moved to our present home, the garden was a blank canvas. That’s to say there was nothing much in it except concrete, grass and weeds. Remembering that nice Mr Titchmarsh’s advice on the tele, to ‘spend little on the plants and a lot on the soil’, I bought some compost and went round filching cuttings from various shrubs I saw that took my fancy.

Ten years on, many of those small cuttings had grown into thundering great triffids that were taking over the garden. Pruning them was taking hours, and generating dozens of bags of green waste for the dump. So this year I decided enough was enough. I dug out the most uncontrollable ones and got rid of them.

A lesson in life

About halfway through digging out some particularly stubborn roots, I realised I was learning a lesson in life. In our personal lives, our families, churches, businesses and elsewhere, we acquire more and more things, we start more and more projects. To begin with, they are good. But as they age, the life and vigour goes out of them. They become thick, woody and deeply rooted. By the time we start wondering what on earth we ever planted them for, they have become incredibly hard to get rid ot.

Dig out the dead works

I suppose these are the things the Bible calls ‘dead works’. Once you know the signs, they are not hard to recognise:
  1. They are past their prime and in decline

  2. They dominate their place. New ideas and fresh thinking are shaded out by what already is. Nothing else can grow in their shadow

  3. They are precious to those who planted or nurtured them, but only tolerated by everyone else

  4. They may bear a little fruit, but it’s nothing like when they were in their full vigour.

  5. They are no longer much joy, just hard work. They provide some sense of satisfaction for a few, but they consume far more than they produce.

  6. They belonged in the garden they were originally planted in. But the garden has grown and changed, and they no longer fit.

  7. Until they are removed, no-one can visualise what might replace them. They are kept, partly because to remove them would just leave an empty space.
Can you see things around you that are like that? Things that have had their day, and are just consuming space and energy? Maybe it’s time to get the spade out.

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