Everything came off at once, and that is the part he cannot make sound reasonable to anybody.
Not one thing. Inside fourteen months: the work he had done for nineteen years, the house that went with it, the group he led on a Tuesday, and then, in the middle of all that, his father, which was not related to any of the rest of it and which arrived like a joke in poor taste.
He is not asking why bad things happen. Kai is fifty-two and he has buried people and sat with people and he is not a man who needs a lecture on suffering. He is asking a narrower question and he has never asked it out loud.
He is asking whether he was cut off.
Because that is what it looked like. Not tested, not refined, not any of the language people used at him during that year with the best of intentions. Cut off. A clean removal of the things that made him useful, and then silence, and then two more years of a life that is smaller in every measurable way.
He walks up through this orchard in the mornings because his brother-in-law keeps it and because there is nowhere else in the district you can be alone at that hour. Rows of old trees, cut wood stacked at the ends, the sea a long way down through the branches.
And he has never once, in three years of walking through a pruned orchard, applied the obvious thing to himself.
If a year like that took your life apart, I am not going to skip past what it cost. Somebody should say the loss out loud before anybody says a word about growth, because a message that hurries to the lesson has insulted the thing that happened. What you lost is gone. Some of it is not coming back in the shape it was.
But there is a question in this orchard worth asking. Which branches does a grower bother to cut?
Read which branch the knife goes near
Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.John 15:2
There are two operations in that verse and they happen to two different kinds of branch.
Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away. That is removal, and it happens to the dead wood, and it is a different thing entirely.
And every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it. Purgeth is a pruning word. It means cleaned, cut back, reduced. And read who it happens to: the branch that is bearing. Not the failing branch, not the disappointing one. The one that is already producing.
That is the sentence for a man in an orchard. The knife does not go near the dead wood; the dead wood gets carried off. The knife goes into the branches the grower has plans for.
You were cut back rather than taken away, and it is already the operation done to the bearing branches, and the blade only ever goes near the ones with a future in them. I am not turning a man's worst year into an encouragement. It is written in John 15:2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a grower's distinction to a man walking through his brother-in-law's rows at seven in the morning.
What pruning actually does, and why it looks like this
And I want to be exact about the picture, because Kai is a practical man and a vague comfort would slide off him.
A pruned tree in the first spring after looks worse than one that was left alone. It has less on it. It is smaller. Anyone walking past who did not know would say the untouched one was doing better, and they would be wrong, and they would go on being wrong for about two seasons.
That is not a consoling metaphor. It is what happens in this orchard every year, and his brother-in-law could show him the rows.
The reason is that a tree carrying too much produces a great deal of small fruit, and the grower cuts to concentrate what is left. The loss is real, the tree is genuinely smaller, and the point is not the smallness. The point is what the remaining wood does with everything it no longer has to divide.
You are carrying less on purpose, and it is already concentration and not diminishment. Scripture says he purgeth it that it may bring forth more fruit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that written purpose true through the season where the tree looks worse.
The one thing a pruned man must not do
And here is the practical warning, because there is one, and Kai is close to it.
A pruned branch in the first year should not be judged, and a pruned man should not judge himself in it either. The temptation is to look at the smaller life and start drawing conclusions about his usefulness, and then to act on those conclusions, which is how a man in year three quietly decides he is finished and arranges his remaining decades around that decision.
You do not read a tree in the spring after the cut. You read it in the third summer.
You are in a season that cannot be read yet, and it is already too early, and the reading was never due in the first year. It is written that He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man steady through the years that give no information.
So this morning, in the rows, we name what is actually there.
Name one thing that is actually different. Out loud. And it must be a true one, because you would not carry a false one twenty yards.
Here is mine for you, and you can reject it if it is not true: you sit with people differently now. Before that year you were the man who fixed things for people, because you had the position and the network and the standing to do it. You cannot do that anymore. So you sit, and you listen, and three people in this district have told your wife what that was worth to them, and you have never once counted it because it does not look like the work you used to do.
You are bearing something now, and it is already fruit, and it grew on wood that had everything else taken off it. The word says every branch that bears fruit, He purges it, that it may bring forth more fruit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at work in three years that gave a man no information about himself.
Then walk down. The cut wood at the ends of these rows gets burned every year and the trees are eighty years old, and both of those things are true in the same orchard.
Declare this over yourself
- Year the knife went through this orchard, you were a pruning and you were never a removal. John 15:2 says every branch that bears fruit He purges, and the blade goes into the branches the grower has plans for. The dead wood is carried off and it is not what the knife is for.
- Conclusion I have been quietly drawing about my own usefulness, get out of these rows, in the name of Jesus. It is written that He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit, and a tree in the first spring after the cut cannot be read by anybody. I am not going to arrange my remaining decades around a reading taken too early.
- Lord, You cut to concentrate and Your Spirit has worked in three years that told me nothing about myself. I am saying the true thing out loud in these rows: I sit with people now, and I could not do that when I was the man who fixed things. That is fruit, I am Yours, and I am walking down.
John 15:2
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