Deadheading

The profusion of blooms on the rose bushes is enhanced by frequent deadheading. I’m not sure why, but I believe it is because the plant then wastes no energy in trying to ‘service’ a bloom which has died, and can invest that energy into creating new and beautiful blooms.

The application of that to life, to my life anyway, is obvious. Unhelpful experiences from the past can be like dead heads, robbing me of vitality and growth. Guilty secrets can drain the colour out of life.  

God says ‘I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.’ Isaiah 43. If God is able to forget our guilty secrets, shouldn’t we give ourselves a break and forgive ourselves?

So in order to flourish and blossom and bloom lavishly in life, we need to deadhead the regrets and the mistakes and the sins, throw them all onto Jesus because he bore them all for us on the cross.

Then, for a rose bush to be profuse, it needs to be fed and watered regularly. Reading God’s word and hearing his voice speaking into our own situations is food and water to the soul.

Blooming Beautiful

Blooming Beautiful

A broom bush gushes out at the end of our driveway. Its flowers, a neon yellow, proliferate in a glorious glow. 

It’s become a challenge to see up the road without creeping halfway into it, but the bush’s splendour makes us hesitate to prune it. It’s becoming a hazard.

We recently had trees pruned which were growing perilously close to overhead electric wires, threatening to break them in a windstorm. The pruners came late and had to remove many branches from the lilac which should be in full bloom now. Instead we are left with a few stragglers and a bunch of branches with blunt cuts. 

Had we pruned the lilac and the broom earlier, they would have had time to form new buds and might have been lush and beautiful ... and safe.

Someone dear to me needs to move into a sort of sheltered accommodation, and she desperately wants to remain at home instead. But it strikes me that we can go now while she is still able to participate in some activities and bloom in a new situation, or we can wait until the danger is such that we need to prune off the blossom of her spirit, which at her age may not easily return and if it does, it may take some time.

The prophet Isaiah wrote a promise that ‘God will keep in perfect peace the person whose mind is focused on him’. We don’t enjoy seasons of pruning. Most of us resist change. I know I do. We are more content to look back at the blossom of former times than to look forward anticipating the blossom to come. 

Jesus promised to be with us always, to the end of the world, and certainly into a new residential situation. I for one am hanging on to that promise and looking forward to what he is going to do in this new season. I am sure there will be blossom and with it, fruit.