Hi friends!!!
While at debrief at the end of month 4 in Zimbabwe, our squad experienced quite a few changes. Two members of the squad are currently being trained to be the new squad leaders and our two squad leaders that came on the field with us will be leaving at the end of this month.
We also had team changes! I was given the privilege to be the team leader on my new team with four other women. We are in the desert of Botswana and it is HOT! In the last five days that we have officially been together, we have already experienced so much growth. We are expectant for good things to come and excited for the Lord to show up!
Yesterday morning as a part of our ministry for the month, we pruned the aquaponics farm.
Anybody who has done any type of farming or gardening before knows the value of the hard work that must be put in in order to bear fruit.
A plant can’t bear fruit and produce what it was created to produce until it has been nurtured and cared for.
To nurture and care for it, it has to be pruned and weeded.
Before there’s anything to prune and weed, it has to have water.
Before you water, the seed must be planted.
Finally, before the seed is planted, the ground must be tilled and prepared to receive the seed.
As my team and I were hard at work, I realized that this concept reflects our lives.
All together, we were dealing with mint, basil, thyme, and cucumbers, but I was working specifically with mint. Mint is a plant that gets overgrown in a short amount of time; it grows and grows and grows. There were long stems that had to be cut back, there were parts that had branched off and died, leaving them black and mushy. Some of the stems had become brown and hard but as I cut into them, some still had a green center. This showed me that there was still life beneath the parts that were hard and rotten. We had to cut off what was dead, prune what was still living so more could grow, and get everything out that didn’t belong.
Isn’t that just like our lives?
As I cut into a brown stem that I thought was dead and noticed the glimmer of green in the center, I realized how it represents us as people. On the outside, the part that everyone sees, figuratively speaking we may look like we are dying. We are covered in layers of sin, failure, shame, regret, comparison, and so on. But inside, there’s still that little bit of life left inside of you, the glimmer of green. Without that little green glimmer, that branch would not produce any mint. To keep living, you have to prune away the things that are stealing from you your source of life. Prune away the things that don’t bear fruit. You have to remove the things from the garden of your life that don’t belong.
For some, maybe that means you have to cut ties with friends that don’t necessarily bear fruit in your life. Maybe it means walking away from something that may seem fun in the moment but leave you in the end feeling guilty and shameful. For others, it could mean walking away from your job because it takes away any joy that you may have and takes life rather that gives it.
It’s important to treat our lives and ourselves like a garden. In the same way that a new seed needs tending to, so do we. We have to nurture and care for the parts of our soul that need healing and new life. Sometimes that means cutting off one of our stems in order to let the healthy parts get all the nutrients and water.
At the beginning of our journey, our mentor, Amy, let us in on what the Lord was showing her for our squad. She took us to John 15, and since then, that whole chapter has been one of our focuses. I encourage you to read it and live it. How sweet of Jesus to physically show me what He meant when he wrote those words to us.
“ I am the true vine, and my father takes care of the vineyard. He removes every one of my branches that doesn’t produce fruit. He also prunes every branch that does produce fruit to make it produce more fruit…I am the vine. You are the branches. Those who live in me while I live in them will produce a lot of fruit. But you can’t produce anything without me. Whoever doesn’t live in me is thrown away like a branch and dries up. Branches like this are gathered, thrown into a fire, and burned.” John 15: 1-2, 5-6
