They Said He Was Pruning Me

The auction was on a Thursday in October and it took four hours.

She stood at the back by the gate because standing at the front seemed like a thing that would need explaining. The machinery went first. Then the stock, which was the part she had told herself she was ready for and was not. Then the ground.

A hundred and six years. Her husband's grandfather bought it and her own children learned to drive on the top field.

There was no fraud and no folly. There were three bad years, a bank that changed its mind, and a price for milk that did what the price for milk does.

Two people have said the word to her since.

The first was a woman she loves, in the church kitchen, hands full of cups, who said gently that she believed God was pruning her.

The second was three weeks later on the phone, from somebody who had thought about it and wanted to be helpful, and who said the same word and then a verse about the vine.

She has not slept properly since the second one.

Because pruning is deliberate. A person does it. It is not weather and it is not a bank. If that word is right, then God came out to her farm with a blade in October, and she cannot lay that beside anything she has known about Him for fifty one years.

If somebody named your worst year for you, you know exactly what I mean.

Nobody in that kitchen knew

Let me be plain about what I am doing. I do not know what God was doing in October. I was not there. Neither was the woman with the cups and neither was the caller, and neither is anybody who talks to you about it at a distance.

And I want to be gentle about them, because you love the first one. She had her hands full of cups and something enormous had happened to somebody she cared about, and people reach for an explanation the way you reach for a rail on a stair. She grabbed one and passed it to you. It was attached to nothing.

Put it down for ten minutes. You can pick it up later if it proves true, and nothing on this page rests on it.

Here is what can be said, and it is not a reason. It is what He does.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Binds up. That is a nurse's verb and a shepherd's verb. It is what you do with linen and hands, close up, to something that is already torn.

And here is the thing worth noticing, because it settles more than it looks like it settles: a person who binds a wound does not have to have made it. Nobody has ever watched somebody bandage a cut hand and concluded that they were holding the knife. The binding tells you what they are doing now. It says nothing at all about how the cut got there.

You are being bound up by God right now, and nothing in that requires Him to have made the wound. That is not my comfort to you. It is written in Psalm 147:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So the sleepless three weeks have not been rebellion. You have had His hands on this since October, and the binding never once needed you to accept a word somebody said in a kitchen. The word settled that long before the auction, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on the porch while you read this.

A word that came from a person is not a word that came from God

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is the whole practical use of this page.

Somebody said a word over your life. She is not a prophet, she was not given a revelation about your farm, and she would tell you that herself if you asked her plainly. What she had was a frightening situation and a familiar word that made it survivable in her own head.

You have been treating that word as though it arrived from heaven, and you have spent three weeks unable to sleep because you have been trying to reconcile a sentence from a church kitchen with fifty one years of knowing God.

You are not failing to submit to a hard truth. You are struggling to accept a claim nobody was in a position to make.

And notice what your sleeplessness actually proves. It proves the word does not fit what you know of Him. That instinct is not rebellion. It is fifty one years of knowing somebody, and it is worth more than a sentence said over cups.

You have permission to grieve a hundred and six years as a loss rather than to receive it as a correction, and that permission is already yours. Psalm 147 has Him binding what is torn; His Spirit is the one who lets a person put down an explanation without putting down their faith.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number. That is not weakness. It is what a person does when a roof comes down.