I was looking out into the garden at the geraniums that had just finished flowering. The plants were bushy and green and healthy, the flowers had finished but the leaves were still looking healthy. I was told if I cut them back to the ground they would flower again in late August. That seemed a bit brutal!
There was nothing wrong with the plants, they weren’t diseased, they weren’t stopping other plants from growing or flowering and they didn’t look out of place or bad. But the advice from the gardener was that in order to get more flowers, the best thing for the plant was to cut it back to the ground.
Sometimes as Christians we can be tempted to ‘do’ so much! Church meetings, committee meetings, mums and tot groups, alpha courses, prayer meetings, multiple services each Sunday, house groups, prayer triplets, coffee mornings etc. none of these are inherently bad but does supporting all that apparently healthy growth inhibit a second round of flowering!?
As a Movement are we supporting green growth that isn’t necessarily bad or wrong but is inhibiting a second flowering? What/who do we need to prune, perhaps apparently quite brutally, in order for new fresh growth and flowering to come?
As an aside from that I put off cutting the geraniums back because it felt too harsh…after a week or so I decided to do it because although the green growth was okay the flowers are why I have those plants. For a day or two it looked awful, I thought I’d made a big mistake. It didn’t take long though for new shoots to grow, for fresh bright green leaves to spring up, for new even healthier, brighter green leaves to come through…there aren’t any flowers yet, but the new life is already springing up and making me smile. The flowers are coming!!
