LESSON FROM THE MASTER GARDENER
February 08, 2022
Prayer: Father, You are the Master Gardener of my life. I know I can trust Your timing to be good and Your pruning to yield the best in my life. Thank You for patiently teaching me through simple moments. I trust You. Amen
Scriptures: There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot… Eccl. 3:1-2
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. John 15:1 ESV
I lost three students from one of my English classes at the semester. Well, my net loss was two, since I also gained a student at the semester, but there are still three young people who I no longer have within my physical sphere of influence, and that always makes me sad. I tend to take it as a personal failing, and I’ve been grieving their loss this past week..
Today I learned a lesson from the Master Gardener. My husband, Juergen, is finally feeling strong enough after a serious illness to care for our rose bushes again, and being winter and all, that means it’s pruning time. If you know me, you know I’m all about all the roses, so every year we have a conversation that goes something like this:
J: There’s a few really nice roses outside.
V: (Stops writing a unit test to grab the clippers) Oh yeah?
V: (Standing in front of a pile of pruned rose branches) You’re cutting them back already?
J: Well, it’s time.
V: But this one has a lot of buds that look like they’ll be ready soon.
J: Well, maybe I could do that one next weekend.
V: This one also has some more buds; can you wait on this one too?
J: Sigh
V: (Eying the purple rose bush that is one of my favorites) Oh, there’s a bud here too.
J: There’s just one and it’ll be weeks before that bud is ready.
V: Sigh
Clipping off as many roses and barely opened buds as I could find for one last vase full, I thought about how pruning season makes everything so bare. The rose bushes look dead in their pruned state. But this is what is necessary for healthy roses in the spring. Rejuvenation and regrowth take time, and I am not a patient person. Juergen is getting a late start on them, so I’ll probably not have any roses to cut for Easter bouquets, but if he were to let them go and not prune them back, their stems would get spindly and weak, and the flowers would be smaller. I know that come the first spring bloom, I’ll be happy he pruned them. It’ll be glorious.
After trimming my roses for the vase, I took the clippings to the yard waste bin outside and noticed a small rose bush that had been uprooted and discarded. Sigh. Another loss. It still had a few spent blooms on it, but it had been struggling and unhealthy, crowded out by other stronger plants.
As I returned to lesson planning, test writing, and thinking about my lost students, I felt the gentle nudge of the Holy Spirit. What I had thought was a welcomed break from test writing to gather a vase of roses was instead a field trip to the front yard for a learning opportunity.
My classes get pruned from time to time for a variety of reasons. This year, two of the three students who dropped were struggling with the rigors of the course. They weren’t thriving. I would have kept them in the class and assisted them, but ultimately, they needed to be planted somewhere else that would help them to grow. The third student seemed to not want to engage, despite my efforts to draw him in. Our class wasn’t a good fit for him.
The Lord knows me well. I will keep students and burn myself out trying to help them (to the detriment of everyone involved) rather than prune the class. I think overall, moving forward, there will be fewer distractions in this group of students, and I’m looking forward to how they will bloom this spring. It took the Master Gardener to do what I would not. I don’t like how pruning feels, but I do love the results down the road.
Copyright Vicki Milczewsky. To connect with the author, email [email protected]
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What a great perspective. We lost a student with RAD over the weekend. He had just turned a corner in my class, but apparently a bed in a full care program opened and he was placed there. What a comfort to think of this a pruning which can produce growth.