🌿Breathe Truth🌿
“Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.
Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit.” —John 15:4-5
🌿Believe Truth🌿
Today, we took a stroll through La Jolla Village. There is a rare street there where individual rose bushes line the sidewalk. Each rose shrub is carefully labelled with its common name. My daughter and I stopped to compare the aromas and found one particular rose that effused our favorite fragrance.
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On this rose bush, three flowers were present. Two young rose buds beginning to open and one mature rose that had bloomed past its time. Petals had fallen off. Petal edges were browning. This rose looked like it was falling apart, which it was. Barely holding on to its stem, this rose was at the end of its bloom cycle. But this raggedy rose gave the deepest scent and strongest perfume of all.
Time does a lot. It changes us and matures us.
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God does a lot. He changes us and matures us.
If we allow God to, He makes us and molds us to be the person we could never be on our own. Failings and failures. God never writes us off. Mistakes and missteps. God never walks away from us.
We are like that raggedy rose. Battles lost. Wind beaten. Petals aging. People have hurt us and damaged us. But we still hang on. Because the Gardener is still working on us, shaping us, pruning us. He’s not finished with us yet. The Gardener can take the hard things that have happened in our lives and out of them, tenderly grow purpose.
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In life, everything has a source. The branch and rose has its source in the vine. Life flows through the vine to the branch and produces the perfume so sweet. Life flows through God the vine to us the branches and produces new life in us so mercifully.
So often, we think we are holding on to God. But really, God is the one who holds on to us, the branches. When we thought we had nothing left to hold on to. When in ourselves, we had come to the end. When we felt small, weak, inconsequential. The vine held us, held on to us, and didn’t let us go. God the vine, is that good of a Father.
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That raggedy rose, the one least likely to emanate any fragrance, had released the strongest, sweetest bouquet. Like that struggling rose, we can bloom and produce something of value and worth because the Gardener chose us to flow new life through, and do life with.
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Stay connected to God the vine. Be held, and let Him hold you. Bloom and be pruned for purpose.
Allow God to prune you and shape you as you grow in the Real Truth.
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