Staying connected on the vine!
Sunday 28 April 2024 1 John 4.7-21 John 15.1-8 Many years ago I had a bad experience with pruning. What made it worse, was it wasn’t my tree, it was at a place I was working. ‘We just need to lop a couple of those over-hanging branches’, I suggested – trouble is, when I lopped them off it was obvious I needed to take a bit off on the other side to match. Then it looked ridiculous because the side branches were short but it went straight up in the middle, so I had to get a step-ladder – every attempt to make it look symmetrical meant I had to take a bit more off somewhere else - by the end of the morning the damage was done. All that was left was a couple of bare branches, and a solitary leaf. Pruning isn’t a job for the faint-hearted. It’s a job for realists, for people who know that a living thing needs to be able to direct its energies into areas of new growth, that dead and dying wood needs to be amputated and growth needs to be encouraged in the direction that’s going to be