A Practical Walk

My main bed of tomatoes morphed into a giant green monster! The different plants were wrapping themselves around each other and it had gotten hard to tell which branch belonged to which plant! It needed pruning.

So I went out and pruned a whole bunch. Not just casually pinching off a sucker here and there, but really getting in there and snipping away.

In this article the author explains how pruning means your plants can focus more on producing fruit instead of just caring for all of the many leaves and stems it keeps growing. Last year my tomatoes didn’t produce much, and I suspect one of the reasons was that I didn’t prune enough.

Sounds a lot like life doesn’t it? When we’re focusing our attention on too many areas, we don’t have time to focus on what really produces fruit.

I’ve also seen this in organizations. They spend so much time doing different projects, that they don’t end up having time for the main goal of their organization.

The same article uses a perfect term (has she seen my garden?), “the tomato jungle”. She points out that this type of situation can make it hard to reach, or even see the tomatoes. What good is a fruit if we can’t get it picked to eat? If we do profitable things, but we have too much clutter in our lives for it to be useful to us or others, is it really profitable?

Just like my tomato plants benefit from some serious pruning, my life does too. Am I pumping too much time, money, thought-life and energy in too many directions instead of where my goals truly lie? Are those other areas becoming the hogs, and taking away from my true purpose? For example, I spend a lot of time cooking….because we’ll die if we don’t eat. Just like cooking is an important job, the leaves do important jobs, and the tomato fruits would never be produced without the leaves. But the end goal isn’t lots of leaves, the end goal is lots of tomatoes. The end goal isn’t lots of cooking, the end goal is healthy bodies to serve the Lord with, and we have to eat to accomplish that.

Now I’m thinking through things in my life that need to be pruned back a bit a lot:

• Mindless scrolling.
• Thinking of all the “what if” scenarios and how to solve them if they should happen to occur
• Trying to control the things and people I can’t control
• Complaining
• Passive aggressiveness towards others
• Holding grudges that encourage said passive aggressive behavior

After thinking about pruning these things in my life, pruning some tomato suckers sounds like a breeze!