My Ask for Pruning
I recently made the mistake of asking God for pruning.
I say mistake not because I regret it but because I knew exactly what I was asking for and did it anyway, which is either faith or foolishness depending on your perspective and probably both simultaneously. That this wasn’t wishful thinking or spiritual naivete. I’ve walked with God long enough to understand what pruning actually means, what it costs, how it works. I know the passage in John 15 where Jesus says “every branch that bears fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2). I know that pruning isn’t punishment nor destruction, but cultivation…. the specific attention of a gardener who sees potential worth protecting.
But knowing what pruning is theologically doesn’t prepare you for what it feels like practically.
Pruning happens with shears. Sharp ones. The gardener doesn’t gently coax dead wood away or wait for branches to fall off naturally. He cuts. Deliberately, strategically, removing what looks perfectly healthy to anyone who doesn’t understand what the plant needs to thrive long-term.
The branch doesn’t know it’s being pruned for greater fruitfulness. From the branch’s perspective, it’s being cut. Wounded. Made smaller when it had been growing just fine, thank you, and didn’t ask for this intervention.
The gardener sees what the branch can’t: that the growth consuming resourcesisn’t actually productive, that energy is being wasted on branches that will never bear fruit, that the plant has become overgrown in ways that prevent light and air from reaching the parts that matter.
So He cuts.
And the plant bleeds sap and looks worse before it looks better and spends a season appearing diminished while internally redirecting resources toward what will actually produce fruit when the time comes.
This is what I asked for. Knowing what it means. Understanding that pruning isn’t about removing dead things—that’s clearing debris. Pruning is about removing living things that are consuming resources better spent elsewhere.
I’ve always had some padding, some margin for error, some cushion that meant unexpected issues were inconvenient rather than catastrophic. The comfortable assumption that resources would always be available, that I could solve problems by throwing more resources at them, that self-made security was stable foundation over temporary circumstance. All of it, due to pruning, getting cut back to force reliance on something more fundamental: Him.
I don’t think God caused the pressure. But I do think He’s using it the way gardeners use existing conditions…drought, disease, pest damage…as opportunity to reshape plants in ways they wouldn’t choose but desperately need.
And then there’s The Boy Who Looks to Me.
Colin is old enough now to recognize that his father treats him the way he used to treat me. The constant monitoring, the privacy violations, the bullying disguised as correction, the shame tactics dressed up as parenting. He’s learning the survival technique of becoming so boring and unresponsive that the person trying to provoke you eventually gives up. He shouldn’t have to know this at his young age. But he does, because his father is who he is and no court order changes that.
This is pruning too. The illusion that I could protect him from his father’s patterns, that shared custody meant shared care, that his dad would treat our son differently than he treated me. The comfortable fiction that someone else would help carry the weight of raising a boy into a man. It’s all on me: all the leadership, all the development, all the modeling of what healthy masculinity looks like despite being a woman who can only describe it secondhand. All the emotional support, all the teaching about boundaries and self-respect and how to navigate relationships with people who don’t know how to love well. The branch that thought it could rely on co-parenting is being cut back to single-parent reality. And maybe that’s what needs to happen for Colin to get what he actually needs rather than what I thought we could provide together.
Despite what all this seems, the purpose to this pain isn’t punishment or testing or making me prove my worth.
Jesus said the Father prunes every branch that bears fruit so it may bear more fruit (John 15:2). The purpose is greater fruitfulness…. more fruit, better fruit, fruit that lasts.
But you can’t see that from inside the pruning. From inside, it just feels like loss. Like being made smaller, weaker, less capable of the things you used to do with ease. Like watching pieces of your life get cut away and being told it’s for your own good when all you can see is the bleeding.. Yet, I knew what I was asking for. I understood that pruning means precision cutting of things that look healthy because they’re consuming resources needed elsewhere.
But understanding it theologically doesn’t make the financial pressure feel less suffocating or the loss of community feel less isolating or hostile environments feel less toxic or the total absence of support feel less terrifying. What it does is provide framework for believing this is purposeful rather than random. That the cutting is precise rather than arbitrary. That there’s a gardener who sees what I can’t see and is shaping me toward fruitfulness I can’t imagine from inside the current season of loss.
Paul wrote that God works all things together for good for those who love him (Romans 8:28). Not that all things are good, but that God works them together, uses even the painful cutting to produce something that couldn’t emerge without it.
I don’t know what fruit this pruning is meant to produce.
I just know I’m being cut back to essentials—just me, just Colin, just God, just survival. Everything else is being stripped away whether I’m ready or not.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the branch was overgrown with things that looked productive but were actually just consuming resources. Maybe the pruning is revealing what’s actually essential versus what I’d convinced myself was necessary.
Or maybe I’m just trying to make theological sense of loss that doesn’t make sense any other way.
Either way, I asked for pruning. And I’m getting it. And all I can do is trust that the gardener knows what he’s doing even when the branch can’t see past the shears.
