Kicking the Can Down the Road

Bonsai has been my hobby for well over 20 years at this point. Taking trees and making them into works of art, living art. Art that changes from year to year and has a real chance at radical transformation over time. In these ideal moments you begin to string together beautiful things on a repeated basis and watch as a tree and a whole collection become something other!!

But the blessing of living art is that is can become the curse of dead art and no one seems to care about your dead tree. I had a couple of moves(hard on trees), a couple of winters with mice eating the bark off of a number of trees that were becoming great little specimens and a winter where my cold storage harbored enough disease to kill off most of the trees inside. At some point it becomes too much and you wonder why you care anymore(probably a devotional thought about God and his patience with us is contained in here).

Most recently I had a season of winter death, a move to a very different climate (giving them a year off to acclimate), followed by a year hesitation or genuine lack of interest. But Bonsai is something you have to stay on top of or it will become an overgrown mess pretty fast. Welcome to my spring of 2023. At this point I am glad to say I have plucked and fertilized and done everything I am suppossed to do, but…

I won’t bore you with the details of a wide variety of trees, but I will take a look at two trees in my collection called Rocky Mountain Junipers (One pictured above). Tough old trees that can survive almost anything except… too much work, too fast. RMJ has a foliage that when mature is very pleasing, but when you work on it too hard the mature foliage will revert back to immaturity (see where I might be headed??!!!)

Mature juniper foliage has a scale-like quality to it. When it stays closed up it has a nice tidy appearance, If you cut off too much foliage, the plant will freak out and the scale will open up(think solar panels collecting as much sun as possible.) The look is pretty ugly, bonsai people know you messed up and the worst part is it will take years to get it back right.

So this is where I sit, me kicking the can down the road has created a situation that needs me to fix it, but fixing it too fast will make the problem even worse. If I wasn’t mindful enough before, will I be mindful enough now? An excellent question!

Several observations about all of this. 1. Development and growth are an ongoing journey of trimming, growth, and rest. To be honest, I’ve filled the whole cycle with rest and growth has gone unchecked and the process of getting things to backbud has been lost and things have mushroomed to an unfortunate place. Ecclesiates speaks about everything in its time and that is important. Because I have done a good job pruning this year, I can live in great confidence that my fertilization will be of great use. Much better than can kickin’.

2. Getting worked on and reverting back to immaturity!! It would be more funny if it weren’t so true. All of our defense mechanisms come spilling out of us in these moments and people around us wonder if the growth is really growth or not. But when we learn how to trust God and settle in with a few branches being cut off or a couple new branches being grafted in, eventually is becomes the genuine and better version of who God made us to be. Our culture is currently lost in the lie that God can’t change us, he’s too powerless to make things new. The gospel is the realization that God can make every broken thing whole. We just want to be left alone in our broken thing, that’s not the good news.

3. Diligence and perseverance. In the world of development, there is always another destination to arrive. We get bored with some step along the journey as though there isn’t always another interesting step to take. Inevitably there is always another skill to develop. Sometimes that’s frustrating cause you wonder if this never ends and it does, when you die and these old things pass away. One of the many reasons we look forward to Heaven!!

Here’s to your season of trimming, or growing or resting. May you sense God’s presence in each of these and step into the journey!