Suffering And Pain: Unexpected UnhurryНамуна

A Time of Pruning

John 15 has been a core passage for me for half my life now. I remember on one occasion when I was going through a bone-dry season, Jesus’ words in John 15:2 grabbed my attention: “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” 

So which branches get pruned? 

The branches that bear fruit.

When the great Gardener prunes the branches of your life and mine, he intends to make our lives even more fruitful than they are today, even more fruitful than we can imagine. This truth clearly implies that seasons will come—often just after a season that had been at least a little fruitful—when a branch looks dry and dead. Any pruning experience, whenever it occurs, can leave us feeling like that branch: dry, lifeless, and maybe even robbed. We may even wonder if we’ll ever be fruitful again.

We may be tempted to question God’s goodness in such hard seasons, but F. B. Meyer, an itinerant evangelist and minister in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offers this insight: “The severity of the test is exactly determined by the reserves of grace and strength that are lying unrecognized within, but will be sought for and used beneath the severe pressure of pain.”

Pruning hurts. 

Yet whenever we find ourselves in a season of waiting or dryness or pruning and therefore find ourselves feeling weak and weary, we can learn to be patient as God sensitizes us to the reality of his ever-present grace in the darkness. When we keep our focus on God like that, we can grow in grace despite—even because of—the hardship. 

Seasons of pruning are perhaps unwelcome places of unhurry. We feel pain, for instance, when God invites us to sink our roots deeper into him by drying up the familiar, comfortable place where we actually may have become stuck. During those times of loss and pain, may we remember the fruit that resulted from earlier times of God’s pruning, fruit that was for our good and for his great glory.

Lord God, thank you for this reminder that seasons of pruning never last forever and that these seasons always bear good fruit. When you next prune me, may I embrace the season of unhurry and sink my roots even deeper into you.

Adapted from An Unhurried Life: Following Jesus’ Rhythms of Word and Rest. Copyright ©2013 by Alan Fadling. Used by permission. For more information, please visit http://www.ivpress.com/an-unhurried-life.