How Jesus Gives Dying A New Meaning

My favorite part of being a keeper of plants is repotting them. It feels like serious expert work as though I’m a seasoned gardener and not a novice one. The roots are where all of the action is and when its time to repot I get to put my hands in the dirt and rip them apart. I get to see what the roots look like and whether or not they’re healthy or unhealthy. I become, albeit momentarily, a plant surgeon and how cool is that!

Sometimes, as was the case with my orchid, the roots are both unhealthy and healthy. I was annoyed to find that even after having recently cut off its old dying ones, it still had some more! So I breathed my anger in, opened my kitchen cabinet to get some potting mix only to find that the potting mix was molded. Clearly something in how I was planting my orchid needed to change.  

After googling “can I grow orchids without soil?” I discovered that I could, so that’s what I did. 

Nowadays, if you peek into my small, bright bedroom, you’ll see my now naked epiphyte. My phalaenopsis orchid now sits in a clear vase which is filled with water 2-3 times a week and then sits without it. You’ll see my naked epiphyte who, once it became unbound, shed a few dying leaves—and orchid leaves are their glory. But the beauty in this shedding of leaves was that for each leaf that fell, a new root began. So as my orchid momentarily lost its glory because of its rotting roots, it gained stability, depth, and connectedness. 

It found its’ winnowing. 

In the same light, as a follower of Jesus’ Way, I am learning to accept the fact that I am going to be dying for the rest of my life. Currently the number one fear that Jesus is calling to die is my fear of rejection and the many ways it expresses itself:

• Inconsistency in my disciplining and correction of disrespectful students 
• Hesitating to initiate friendship without the guarantee of reciprocity 
• Hesitating to remain vulnerable as I continue to cultivate closeness with my boyfriend
• Hesitating to remain vulnerable as I allow my close loved ones and friends to see the real me 
• Learning to continuously accept myself in the face of my own sin, short-comings, and imperfections 

All of these things scare me and take intentional effort on my end. They are necessary deaths, imperfect and hard amens; they are the shriveled glories of orchid leaves. And yet as each fear is faced another root is formed, another piece of fruit is born. 

I’ve already shared this process in a previous post, but I am going to share it again because I am continuously seeing God shed this light of truth into my life. As we grow in our relationship with Christ, this process of dying and growing is to be accepted. It is exactly what Jesus speaks of when he says he prunes the branch that bears fruit, meaning he removes the unhealthy parts in order to allow his fruits to grow. 

We can’t grow if we don’t allow him to do this. If we try to do it for ourselves, we run the risk of running ahead of him in our own growth as opposed to walking beside him as he cultivates us. Whenever I’ve tried to force myself to grow in an area that Jesus hadn’t initiated growth in, I faced discouragement and self-improvement burn out. Likewise, when I failed to respond in faith to an area Jesus was initiating growth in I’d feel spiritually stagnant. But when I respond with faith, I am able to enjoy (sometimes) the process of growing in Christ-like habits, attitudes, and perspectives.

So what is it for you friend? What leaves are you clinging to that need to fall off? Are you afraid to let them go because you think they’re your glory?

 My encouragement to you is to allow Jesus to perform his winnowing within you and the best place to start with this is prayer. Borrow the words of David from Psalm 139: 23-24 

“Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

Point out anything in my that offends you,

and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”

Psalm 139: 23-24

Then wait. 

Love and Light,

Kourtney Naomi