This morning, I spent a little time pruning the new cilantro/parsley plants I recently transplanted into my garden. I had purchased them from a local grocery store as “living herb” plants and wanted to see if they would thrive in the vertical gutter planter my husband DIY’d for our deck.
When I went out there, I noticed a few things:
- As plants had been transplanted from plain old potting mix with light watering into a compost mix with wood chips and daily watering, many of their roots started moving up and out of the soil
- Some of the plants thrived in the new soil and regained life because they were hungry for and prepared to receive more water and nutrients
- But the rest of the plants had killed off almost all of their original stalks and, in their place, were growing brand new baby stalks from the base of the plants.
It made me think about what happens when God tells us to move into a new season of life, especially one that requires a physical move of job, church, or home. The move often causes parts of us that may have been fruitful in the last season but are not going to be fruitful in this season to die off because we have been transplanted into different soil. This pruning makes room for new growth that is optimized for the new soil—but it can feel very painful and even scary to shed what you thought was a necessary part of your identity.
So if you recently followed God into a new season of work, ministry, or community and you feel like you’re falling apart, you’re probably not. You’re just shedding those parts of your former life that were not prepared to receive the extra nutrients from this new season. Let them go. Grieve their loss. And look for the new growth that will help you flourish in your new soil.
