I Cut Off Things Nobody Asked For

He found the box when they moved and he sat on the floor of an empty room with it for longer than he meant to.

Fishing gear. Old, good, his grandfather's, and the small notebook that went with it where the old man had written where and when for about thirty years in handwriting that got shakier toward the back.

He put it in the garage twenty three years ago. He remembers the week.

He had come to this at twenty six, all at once, the way some people do, and the whole of his life had gone through a sorting. And a great deal of what he set down needed setting down and he would not take a single one of those back.

But some of it did not.

Nobody told him to stop fishing. Nobody said a word about the notebook, or about the songs his aunt sang, or about half of what went into the garage that spring. He did it himself, at speed, out of a picture in his head of what a man becomes when this happens to him, and the picture was assembled out of about four sermons and a book cover.

He sat on that floor at forty nine and thought: I pruned myself and I did not know where the joints were.

You know that box.

Maybe yours is a language you stopped speaking. Maybe it is music, or a craft, or a way of cooking, or a set of friends who never did anything wrong. Maybe you cannot even name what went, only that there is less of you in the room than there used to be and you assumed that was maturity.

And nobody is at fault. That is the thing. The people who taught you did not hand you that list, and you did not invent it out of malice. It came out of wanting to do this properly, which is the most understandable thing in the world.

What the operation actually cuts

Here is the thing about a graft, and it is worth being exact, because the picture in most people's heads is a picture of loss.

The cut severs the branch from its old root. That is all it severs.

The wood is not planed down. The grain is not replaced. The shape of the branch, the way it grows, the character of what it produces, all of that goes into the new tree unchanged. What is taken away is the old supply line, because a branch cannot be fed from two places.

One cut. One thing removed. Everything else travels.

You are rooted in Him, and the cut that made that true took your old supply and not your grain. That is what the verb is doing in the sentence rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith (Colossians 2:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the new supply, and He has never once required a person to be sanded down before He would flow into them.

The over-pruning is a real thing and it is not a sin

Now let me say something carefully, because it would be easy to turn this into a second failure and I will not.

What you did at the beginning was an act of love. You were handed something enormous and you wanted to hold it properly and you did not know yet which parts of your life were the old root and which parts were just your life. So you cut generously, because that is what a person does when they are afraid of getting it wrong.

That is not a sin and it does not need repenting of. It needs undoing, which is a different job and a much gentler one.

You were not being foolish, and the over-pruning came out of love rather than out of error. Scripture says charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things (1 Corinthians 13:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who was in a twenty six year old carrying boxes to a garage, glad about what was happening in him, not standing there with a list.

And this page hands you no list either. Nothing here tells you what to pick up or what to leave, or what anybody should keep, and if a page ever hands you a set of practices to restore it has just done to you the exact thing that filled the garage.

What the tree does with a branch's own character

Here is the part that is easy to miss and it is the whole comfort.

A grafted tree is not uniform. Go and look at one. It has limbs that came from different places and they do not match, and the tree is not confused about this, and nobody stands in an orchard worrying that one branch is not sufficiently like the others.

The root does not require sameness. It requires connection.

You have been joined and not standardized, and there is nothing in this tree that needed you to become like the branch beside you. The word says now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him (1 Corinthians 12:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who divides to every man severally as he will, which means the differences you have been quietly filing off were placed rather than tolerated.