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The
Pink Room: Thoughts About Intentional Living
Chapter
19/ Accepting Me.
Part
1 (Previous post contain the previous chapters.)
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Listening to the radio, I stopped at
this station with a preacher talking about pain and life. He said "I don't
know who to attribute it to," so I don't feel bad about not attributing it
to him either, "but I heard this quotation once: He's never closer to the
vine then when He's pruning the branches."
It is an interesting visual, the
gardener kneeling under the vine, His face up close inspecting which branches
and blooms and leaves to trim. My aunt, who is a great gardener said you trim
one third of the oldest growth and then all the new growth down to the previous
trim marks. I’m not a gardener, although I wouldn’t mind trying it, so I
believed her. I tried it on my parent’s hedges and it made them look terrific.
If we pruned out one third of the
old outdated stuff to make room for new things, and cut back in all the areas
that have gotten out of control, we’d actually be in okay shape. It is a good
principle. But the closeness of God’s face comes with pruning according to that
preacher—inspecting and making decision on what would be best to keep and to
prune.
I felt the closeness of God when I
walked in on my trashed apartment moments after it was burglarized. I also felt
a different closeness of God when my father had a massive heart attack and
almost died, when I decided to move across the country for college. When so
many things had gone awry, in a year, that one night I just about lost my mind;
I felt God there too. I think in the good times, the ones filled with love and
peace we forget that is God. Love and peace, we assume are moments and we know
and enjoy them—but if I am honest with myself there is a distinct similarity to
the restful love and peace feeling to the feeling when I knew God was with me
during trauma.
Brother Lawrence wrote
"Practising the Presence of God" and talked about being cognizant
through the moments of each day and continually practicing awareness that God was
in the present moment. Is it possible to know peace and love during all moments
of the day? And it is a wonderful and transformational idea when we begin to
realize the care and love God feels for us in the mundane moments of laundry
folding and making toast, but there is a different depth in those other
moments.
Maybe there are dark places when God shows up because the pruned places are
raw and vulnerable; all our emotions are accessible and God knows we will feel Him with us. Maybe because He knows our
needs, and just really really wants to be near and love us and help. Maybe because we need to believe, I need to believe, I'm lovable.
His love does change me, the moments
when I knew He was near changed me.
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I guess then it doesn't matter so
much about all the details, it just matters that He loves me enough to come
close.
