A Late Summer Bounty

We sat and we talked. We spoke on themes of great importance and others of equal unimportance. We passed a couple hours on a summer afternoon which invited both laziness and the conversation of friends.

When our talk was over, he said, “Do you garden?” and I replied, “Do you garden?” Since we were at his home, my question was easily answered in a stroll from the living room sofa to the rear-of-the-lot chain link fence and then back to the front line of his property.

We admired iris and pinks, roses and day lilies. We inspected peppers, tomatoes, scallions, and cucumbers. But the most fascinating plant of all was one Concord grape vine.

From a single twisted stalk ten inches across at its base stretched out a vine whose total length exceeded seventy feet of fence top. It is warmed and watered by nature’s gifts. The vine is routinely sprayed -just once- each summer as soon as the purple fungus appears. And it is pruned radically each season by its long-time owner and care-giver. The result is a vibrant, leafy vine with multiple healthy clusters of grapes that promise a late summer bounty.

My conversation partner has long tended this one vine. He knows the secrets of its annual productivity. He says that you may leave it unpruned, but its yield is vastly curtailed. Instead of full clusters with thirty to forty or more grapes each, the unpruned vine offers a scraggly and meager bunch of ten or twelve small grapes. Only the new growth of a new season is copiously prolific.

This gardener has seen in God’s nature the picture of God’s truth, a truth we see preserved in Scripture. Unless the plant is pruned it is unproductive. Further, until our lives are tended by God, we cannot expect a significant crop. The harvest is dependent on God removing the old from our lives. Once that is done the new can take its place. Only the new growth yields abundance. Each new season demands a renewed effort. And each first-time effort is rewarded later as the intent of the Gardener is fulfilled in us.

Pruning is only the exciting proof of a pristine cycle where life is meaningful and God is still at work.

Tim Gramly
South Haven Baptist Church
Belton, Missouri
July 21, 2009