I was told once that you should prune roses in Texas on Valentine’s Day.  It seemed odd to me, paradoxical even, that roses, the emblematic flower of this lovers’ holiday, should be cut and hacked on that very day. 

My roses were planted over four years ago when the previous owner had the old flower bed ripped out and a new one put in as he was selling the house to me. I understood that the fresh landscaping was a bit of a gift, but I was underwhelmed with the immature plants that adorned the large space that flanked the front and sides of my post-divorce home.  I couldn’t imagine that this infant foliage could ever be as beautiful as the mature tropical plants that had been removed. One year later, however, I was pleasantly surprised as the colorful plants began to mature and blossom, filling the space both in a literal and aesthetic sense.  

I grew to appreciate the new garden, just as I did my new single and fifty-ish life.  Little by little, the shackles of my overbearing and difficult marriage were shed, and I grew metaphorically as the roses grew literally.  

I never pruned the roses. Each year the bushes were larger and filled with more and more of the colorful gems.  Countless buds.  Nine red rose bushes had been planted and a single yellow one.  By the second year, the flower beds were gorgeous and wrapped in rouge and canary as the bushes grew unchecked by any shears.  

This past summer, however, a curious thing happened. The flood lamps in my security light went out and needed to be replaced.  I donned a ladder to attempt the task and realized that I couldn’t get to the lights without being scratched to shreds by the thorns. The untamed bushes had not been checked for four years, and the one blocking the lights, in particular, reached above the gutter system on my roof.  Not only did it grow higher than the security lights, it also blocked the window of my breakfast room dimming the morning sun.  

I decided that it wasn’t worth fighting with the thorns, so I would prune the bushes.  That is when I learned that it wasn’t healthy for the plants to do so until the frosty temperatures of February arrived. I suppose some wise person had paired the pruning and purchasing of these flowers and come up with a memorable date – Valentine’s.  

So this past February, after six long months without adequate outdoor lighting, I tackled the task. My dad loaned me his shears. I had not even bothered to purchase a pair since I moved into the house. To say it was difficult was an understatement. Even though I had on long sleeves and gardening gloves, the bushes fought back. As I tried to pull away the clipped branches, it seemed as if the ones still attached to the stalk would intertwine and hold on, refusing to release their beloved companions. So I would pull harder and inevitably grab hold of the wrong part of a branch and sink thorns into my fingers and cause them to bleed. Other branches seemed to grab and clutch at me, and multiple thorns would cling to my sleeves and claw at the vulnerable arms underneath, branches desperate not to be pruned.

It was more than physically painful; I had mixed feelings about cutting back these flowers that had grown so uninhibited in my yard. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone want to prune something so wild and beautiful?”

That is when it hit me. For months God had been putting me through a season of pruning that was not unlike this very thing. Since the divorce, I had grown unchecked. My newly acquired freedom was fertile ground for expression and experimentation the likes of which I hadn’t been able to imbibe in for many years. And while I was mostly growing in ways that were beneficial and beautiful, it was not at all without thorns. The security lights were hidden, the healthy branches entangled with the ones that needed to be removed, the view from the window of my soul was obscured by the mass of undergrowth blocking the Son.

And in this pruning season, I was fighting God as valiantly as the rose bushes were now fighting me, wondering why he would want to cut at something so wild and beautiful as I thought my life had become.  I was clutching onto the branches He was trying to remove, intertwining myself with those drying and withering ones that He had already cut off, refusing to allow the refuse to be discarded so that new blooms could eventually form. 

But the epiphany was not just that I was being pruned. In spite of the arduous process, I knew the roses would be beautiful again come April, with sprigs of new growth on sturdy stalk yielding fresh red and yellow blooms. I realized that pruning was an act of love, and that the greatest of all Gardeners was not cruel in the process but preparing me for a spring with abundance that I could only yet imagine.