Getting Rewired, Being Pruned.

My good friend Clinton Jackson whose humour
I love, cracked a joke about how,
since the cardiologist was going to thread wires into my heart to fix it,
he should also just throw in some superhero powers as a bonus
while he was at it.

Well, I did not get the power of invisibility
or the power to fly, but in the process of
getting my heart physically rewired, I found that
my thoughts were undergoing a 'rewiring' of their own.

I found myself writing more than usual, thoughts
and reflections spilling from my pen, feelings
of gratefulness, sadness, joy, were surprisingly
more intense. I found myself reflecting more
upon spiritual matters.

It felt as if my heart had been rewired to tune
in more to thinking about God's hand in my life.
Rewired to get rid of clutter and just focus
on the essential.

Some friends and fans wrote to me to share
their own stories of medical challenges and
I realised that the feeling of re-prioritising
one's life and finding a deeper realisation of and thankfulness
for one's blessings was a common sentiment expressed.

Perhaps that's what being pruned is all about.

I remember feeling upset some time during Winter
a couple of years ago when the lusciously green rose
bushes in my garden were pruned by the gardener,leaving
the plants suddenly barren, with just basic, thorny stumps in the ground.

At that time, I could not understand why the gardener
had done what he did and I feared that the rose
bushes would never flower again the way they once did.

But when Spring finally arrived, it was
amazing to see how the stumps suddenly
started budding and before I knew it,
the rose bushes were blossoming with more
abundant blooms than ever. The amazing
thing was that where a branch had been cut off,
two more branches had grown in the same
spot, making the rosh bush even more green.

We all get pruned in some way or another.
Some of us are physically pruned, having to
undergo physical challenges, some emotionally
pruned, perhaps having to be pruned of something
we were emotionally dependent on, perhaps being
pruned of a bad habit and now having to grapple
with walking a different path.

Pruning can involve discomfort, even pain,
and as I see my toddler nephew having
to go through the discomfort and pain of teething,
I'm reminded that oftentimes, pain is part
of the process of growing.

A nun, Mother Angelica writes in her book "Mother
Angelica's Little Book of Life Lessons and
Everyday Spirituality" :

"As I look back, pain was always a preparation for me.
The Lord allowed pain before accomplishing anything He asked me to do. It made me more aware of my own weaknesses, my own faults, my own incompetence, my own lack of knowledge...
it made me appreciate the fact that God must do everything."

A little while after I read that, I was talking with
my good friend Ann and telling her how it seemed that
my most recent pieces of writing seemed to have more of
a spiritual bent and that I was a little apprehensive
about sharing spiritual reflections in my blog.

To which Ann simply replied : "You're budding."

Thank you Ann.