MaryLyn At Home

After a particularly taxing day of parenting I signaled to my husband that I was bugging out, put on my headphones, and headed to the garden. I needed to touch some grass, so to speak.

I sat on said grass just outside the brick border of the garden, intent on decompressing. But it wasn’t long before I started noticing things that needed my attention in the garden; there were several patches of weeds that had gotten big enough to get pulled, my cucumber trellis was sinking into the dirt on one side, and kale needed to get harvested. But most pressing, I noticed there were large suckers all over my tomato plants that I had somehow missed.

What are suckers, you may ask? Let me tell you!

So there’s a main tomato stalk, from which branches grow that will eventually grow tomatoes. Suckers are small branches that grow at the junction in between the main stalk, and the fruit bearing branch. When a sucker forms there, it pulls all the energy that should go to the fruit bearing branch. As long as the sucker is there, the fruit branch won’t be able to bear fruit, and the sucker will never bear fruit either. For my visual learners, below is a picture of the first sucker that caught my attention. You can actually see how pale the branch on the right is, compared to the main stem and the sucker!

Usually, I catch suckers when they’re about an inch long, but as my eyes wandered over my plants, I realized I’d really let things slip this week, and there were about a dozen suckers that were at least three inches long, each. I got to work snipping them off, mentally kicking myself that my plants could have been working on so many more tomatoes all this time, if only I’d done a better job policing things. My plants are my little babies, so in a way I felt like I had let them down. (Yes, I know plants are not sentient beings)

Then I thought of how God prunes the sin in me, and how suckers are kind of like sin. A rogue branch that sneaks up between the vine and the branch, stealing resources and tanking the output possible for that branch. It’s almost like Jesus used some parables about this, isn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but I’m really grateful that God doesn’t randomly remember that He needs to prune me, when my sin has gotten big enough to catch His notice. He doesn’t jump up from the grass like I did, and go on a paranoid frenzy pawing through to make sure he got them all.

I’m thankful that He is constantly tending, pruning, and disciplining those He loves, and that by Jesus’ blood, I am one of those. If you are in Christ, you are one He loves too, and He takes great joy in removing the sin in you that is keeping you from bearing fruit.

-M