Tomato Vines

I was out pruning my tomato plants yesterday in hopes that what I have read and heard about pruning them will really help produce a larger crop of bigger tomatoes. Tomato plants are a vine, of course, and can get very large and cumbersome. They can get so large that it almost feels like going through a jungle to try and find the ripe tomatoes. Most of what is on a tomato plant doesn’t even grow tomatoes. There are “branches” off of the main vine that grow nothing but leaves. These are the parts of the plant that I prune off.

As I was looking at the tomato plants and what I was cutting off, I thought about how similar these tomato plants are to our own lives. There are so many things happening in all of our lives. These can be things like, church callings, taking care of our children, hanging out with friends, making dinner, going out to the movies, soccer practices, reading the scriptures, watching TV, working on a talent, reading books, exercising, using the computer, shopping, taking a nap, playing games, and the list goes on and on. With everything that we do and feel we need to do, our lives can easily feel like that jungle of tomato vines that is hard to get though to find the fruits.

On the tomato vines, I was taking off many of the unneeded parts of the plant. The parts that perhaps take the nutrients from the tomatoes. I realized that I could try to take the unneeded things out of my own life to make it easier for me to see what I need to be doing and to see where I am going. There are many things we all do in any given day that we probably don’t need to do or could have done differently. Maybe I would decide that watching TV needs to be pruned so that I have more time/nutrients for reading the scriptures or something. Maybe I am just feeling overwhelmed and decide that it would be best to prune out the soccer practices, so I am not running all over the place all the time. Pruning out the things that make our lives more complicated than they might need to be can do a lot to help us feel better about ourselves. And, maybe it will be easier for us to notice what kinds of fruits we are producing. Sometimes it is hard to know what part we are supposed to prune. Reading books usually isn’t bad to do, but if it takes the place of reading Scriptures or taking care of our families and responsibilities, then it is. In a case like this, we might not want to take it completely out of our lives. It is a good thing to do, but maybe moderating it is a better solution than taking it out completely.

There are times when I prune the tomato vines, that I accidentally prune the wrong part. I cut off a part of the plant that could have grown and produced wonderful tomatoes for me. There’s no replacing it and it is gone. In this, we do differ from a tomato plant. In our lives, if we accidentally prune out something that is important to our development, we can grow it back. We have been given the wonderful gifts of repentance and forgiveness. Say we unknowingly prune out Scripture study from our lives. It is not gone forever. We can repent and try to make it right again by studying our Scriptures again. Some of these wrong prunings might be a lot harder to repair than others, but they can be done. People generally have a hard time coming back to church if they have pruned it out of their lives. It takes a lot of work, repentance, and humility to come back. It would be a lot easier to not prune the important things out.

Well, these were my ponderings of the day. I can now start to work on pruning my life a little bit better to make sure the important things get the attention they need.