Day 11 Brutal pruning.

When I started the blog this Lent I felt God say to me that I was to keep my eyes open and say what I was seeing.  This morning I saw this.   The trees in the churchyard in Hillsborough have had a really brutal pruning.  They look terrible.  A whole avenue of them have been cut back so hard that they just look like stumps standing tall, stark and sad.  I was quite shocked to see them like that.  Im pretty sure the last time I went past they were branchy and tree like.


After taking the photo I went to meet up with my friend Lou for lunch.  And she was telling me about her sister in law who, for a year and a half, ignored a skin lesion which was growing and changing on her stomach.  Until such a time as it began to be painful and sore when she took herself off to the GP.  She was immediately whisked into hospital for tests and biopsies etc and is waiting for the results at the moment.  But the doctor was very concerned.  My reaction was the same as everyone elses - why did she leave it so long?   If you have something growing under your skin why would you not go and get it checked out - just to be on the safe side?   It seems obvious, but lots of people ignore the signs, push these things to the back of their minds, or through fear of the consequences dont get help soon enough.

Somehow the trees and the delay in seeking treatment connected together in my head with the verse in Matthew

If your hand or your foot causes you to fall into sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than to have two hands and two feet and be thrown into the eternal fire. 9And if your eye causes you to fall into sin,gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for youto enter life with one eye than to have two eyesand be thrown into the fire of hell.  Matthew 18 :9

We know that it makes sense that when we have a cancer in our body we get it chopped out as soon as possible to stop the cancer spreading and affecting our whole body.  If we have gangrene or blood poisoning sometimes the only way to stop the spread is amputation.  It is a brutal, but life saving pruning.  The trees in the churchyard have been drastically cut back because the church wants to avoid any chance of falling branches leading to damage, injury or even death.  They are big trees and we have had some wild weather of late.  Rather than wait for an accident to happen the tree surgeons have been out being proactive

Jesus was really direct about the fact that our spirits and souls can be diseased and affected in just the same way that our bodies can.  We are so very susceptible to temptation and are so easily led into sin.  Jesus says that just as we should be ruthless with the cancer in our body and cut it out so that we might live - sin is a cancer in our spirit which needs to be cut out too.  Drastic measures may be needed, but our lives depend on it - our eternal lives.   We read these verse and tell ourselves that Jesus was just being figurative - he didnt really MEAN for us to pluck out an eye or cut off a foot.  But what if He did?  Or what if He was being deliberately provocative in order to shock us out of our complacency and make us take another look at ourselves. ?  

Lent is a time for reflection and self examination.  A time for weeding out and pruning back and getting rid of the dead wood.  It is never fun to cut things out, put things away, set people down, resist temptation, confess sins and submit ourselves to God's pruning hook.  But it is His way.  And His way is life and truth and peace.