Viciously cut

We are passing several milestones this week, the best one being that Wednesday is our 20th Anniversary, and the second milestone that is pretty significant as well, is that we have begun living in the same house for a third year! We have never lived at the same address for longer than two years at anytime in our 20 years of roaming this planet as a married couple. It seems amazing that this could happen, but two years was, until this month, the longest that we had ever lived in the same place (house, town, city, etc) without a move to somewhere else.

I could probably spend a couple of weeks telling you what this constant flux in our lives has taught us and costs us, perhaps especially the children, but that is not the point of this particular blog. This blog is about sweet fruit and being viciously cut. When we moved into this house in Skopje, the front parking area had a grapevine trellis as does many of the homes here in the former Yugoslavia. (Wine is Macedonia’s number two export). So while we had the trellis, we had no grapes and no grapevines and I asked the landlord about why this was so. He took me to one corner of the yard and showed me the grapevine stub.

It was a stub because they had cut the vine back all the way to the root! This was no trim job nor was it a pruning of bad vines, nor was it a decent shearing. This vine had been viciously cut back all the way to the ground. I asked Olgitsa why they had dealt so harshly with the vine and she told me, because it had stopped bearing sweet fruit, and then it had stopped bearing fruit at all! The only way to save the vine and have it possibly produce sweet fruit ever again, was to viciously cut it.

And today, two years later, I cut grapes off this vine and I ate them while sitting at my kitchen table. Olgitsa was correct in her remedy for a vine that produced poor fruit and then no fruit at all. A vicious cutting to the very root was the only way to jump start good production once again. Here is a picture of my grapes on the vine!

It was a rich reminder of John 15 isn’t it? “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” I have a feeling that much of the difficulties that come our way in life are a result of a vicious cutting. Cut to the quick as we used to say. And while this is more painful than we think we can bear, two years later comes the sweetest juiciest fruit you can imagine.