Pruning

Earlier today I heard the sound of a power saw outside. I felt right at home, as I used to do tree work in the early 1980s (and even in 1993) to help pay for my college tuition. The climber was nearly outside our window trimming away branches on a large tree in front of our apartment that hadn't been trimmed for 7 years.

My wife and kids enjoyed watching the climber cut limbs and drop them. I enjoyed not being the man on the ground who had to pick them up and avoid being hit.

For a tree to stay healthy, it is important to regularly prune it. Our tree has now lost some of its shade, at least for this summer, as all of the smaller branches were removed. It's pretty bare and looks like a skeleton of what it was. However, this pruning allows for the most important parts of the tree to have an easier time getting the nutrients from the soil and the rain water that it needs. If it were never trimmed, then it would be at greater risk for different tree illnesses that can rot away its inside while the outside still looks good. I've seen some pretty large trees that suddenly crashed during a storm because they weren't healthy on the inside.

Lent is a time of life pruning. It's a time of self-examination and evaluation of what is important and what is urgent. Sometimes, what appears to be urgent isn't really important, like some phone calls. Sometimes, what is important, but isn't necessarily urgent, gets crowded out of our schedule by all the noise in our lives.

Last week I had the chance to read the short booklet by R.A. Torrey titled "Why God Used D.L. Moody" (Worldwide Publications, 1992). Torrey suggests the following reasons:
1. A fully surrendered man
2. A man of prayer
3. A deep and practical student of the Bible
4. A humble man
5. His entire freedom from the love of money
6. A consuming passion for the salvation of the lost
7. Definitely endued from power from on high

These are all good standards to which I can compare where I'm currently at.