Deadheading

My dark pink "Knockout" roses around the swimming pool fence are amazing. They bloom for months and make the whole back yard alive with color. They grow large and quickly, producing several buds on the end of one stem.

I was pruning them this week, standing in the beautiful fall sunshine and noticing how many roses were yet to bloom in November. When you cut a dead flower off the shrub, it's called "deadheading". The whole point is to get rid of the dead flower so a live one can grow in it's place. The more you prune, the more the roses multiply.

There's a spiritual analogy here (and God used the whole pruning thing in the Bible) that really hit me this week. We have to get rid of the "dead" in our lives to blossom with new life, but there is also a period of "nothing"... that time between the dead and the live. You can't see the new growth, but it's coming. And it's going to be beautiful when it arrives.

Sometimes I feel dead and sometimes I feel alive, but a lot of life is that in between time... when growth is happening, but you can't see it. Maybe you can't even feel it. You wonder if God's at work. You wonder if He cares that you just got pruned back and it hurt. You wonder if He's going to let the whole branch just die - or restore it with even more blooms.

I've lived longer than a lot of you and I can tell you the answer. He's going to restore it with even more blooms. The Bible is true. God is a restorer. He's a multiplier (ever notice he doesn't add? He multiplies!). He uses the time from cutting off to breaking forth. He strengthens us then. We wait. And then we see the beauty. And it's worth it.