This weekend, I posted a long update on my stoke recovery blog,
Stroke of Grace. I wanted to share a portion of that post with you here, because, while not a topic directly addressed in my upcoming book, it will give you a taste of the "flavor" you might expect to find behind the devotionals in
Harvesting Hope from Heartache:
God decided yesterday's gardening hours were a great living object
lesson time. I had one really huge, really wild and overgrown, totally
healthy [rose] bush. This spring it has gone crazy, throwing out lush stalks
several feet long in all directions. It looked so vibrant, it seemed a
shame to prune it at all, but it had grown so intently that it totally
blocked a walkway between it and the next bush. I could find very little
to prune for the health of the plant, but knew the only way to both
reclaim my pathway and to encourage voluminous blooming of the whole
plant later this spring, would be to bring the unshapen plant under the
harsh cuts of the pruning sheers while the sprouts were young and
pliable today.
After clearing out a very few branches in need of pruning, I took some
well-planning, but perhaps seeming brutal whacks at the path side of
that plant, adding dozens of feet of long, strong, beautiful, thriving
branches to my discard pile, taking that side of the plant down by half
or more in size.
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| June, 2013: end result of pruning! |
I told God that it seemed amazing that rather than
shocking the plant to death, I knew my actions were simply to bring
around more intentional design and purpose, resulting in a more pleasing
and fruitful bush. The more pruned, the more plentiful the expected
flowering later this spring and summer. He replied to my heart, "This
is what I am doing in you!"
Once I had that first side molded to my design again, it occurred to me
that now the plant looked pathetically out of balance, lopsided, so I
continued hacking my way around the whole bush until it was beautifully
rounded, but only a shadow of the lush plant I had started with. Still, I
am confident that in a month or two, the pain I inflicted today will
result in a multitude of glorious blossoms in my healthy, well-grounded
bush that no longer risks uprooting in our violent wind storms, like the
tumble weeds that roll down the street, much too substantial in size
for their relatively tiny root structures to hold them fast in place.
The more I thought about it, God seemed to explain that my life was much
like that rose bush, wild and thriving and chasing after every
opportunity to stretch and send out exploring fronds. It took ten years
of infertility, losses, and decades of chronic illness
to begin to tame me, but while I didn't enjoy the pruning process in
the least, it was necessary so that my vigor for life didn't lead me so
far out of God's intended design that I couldn't accomplish the purpose
He intended me to fulfill. It wasn't that those passions were unhealthy
or unwise, but the abundance and scattered directions threaten to leave
my roots unstable, thus becoming undesirable in their very abundance.
Once that first season of pruning was brought toward conclusion, I had one
area of my life mostly trained into obedience, but that seemed to make
the rest of all my wild longing more prominent. I see the additional
shaping of this strong, healthy plant as my strokes, the ongoing
recovery journey toward recovery, and our private family battles. I have
been left shattered, violently pruned under the often seemingly unkind
hand of the Master Gardener, but he knows that the only way to refocus
my many thriving branches (abundance of gifts I had been blessed with,
such as a signing voice, playing my flute, the ability to gracefully
communicate with both hands via Sign Language, physical beauty, artistic
expression through a variety of crafts and mediums I can no longer
physically manage, the abundance of home-based business I have tried my
hands at over this past decade, even the continued homeschooling of my
children, and so much more I haven't even had time to identify yet) is
to remove all that fall outside His intent for my life, to not leave me
all those opportunities for "chasing after the wind," but bring me down
to the bare essentials and start the training process anew (if I had to
guess today, I think the critical areas God would have me focus on now
would be family, home, health recovery, and writing that may eventually
lead to public speaking) so that I may eventually harness that untamed
enthusiasm and bring forth a bountiful harvest under His intended plan. I get it, more clearly than I ever have, God.
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| Jennifer Saake, last professional picture taken pre-stroke, October, 2010. |
