Whenever I lead a YoungLife Campaigners lesson, everything around me that week seems to apply so well to whatever I talked about. It makes me wonder if my intensive study of that part of Scripture just makes me more aware of the examples of it in my own life, or if God presents me with situations and opportunities to help me understand more of what I was studying... From what I know of myself, and of God, it would make sense that it's a combination of the two.

On Monday, I led a discussion of the "Vine and the Branches" from John 15. The basic idea is that Christ is the vine, and we are the branches through which Christ produces fruit. It talks about how God prunes us to make us better equipped to bear fruit for him, and the pruning often involves hard times in our lives that we must work through to become stronger in our faith.

Yesterday, Luke and I found out that the youth pastor of our church cut off part of a finger in a freak snowblowing accident, and the doctors were not able to reattach it. This particular youth pastor often plays guitar during services and during youth ministry events, and was planning on going on a rock climbing trip with some high school kids this spring. Since the injured finger is on his left hand, it will very much impair his guitar playing ability, and he may not be healed in time for his rock climbing trip.

So immersed this week in vine, branches, and pruning thoughts, it makes me wonder... If God prunes us to make us better at producing fruit for him, and he quite literally pruned a small appendage off of our youth pastor that was helping him to produce fruit through music and youth ministry, what is his plan for this guy? At one point in my life, thinking about that would have made me doubt God's plan, but now it just excites me... When God has shut down things in my life that I was really counting on, He has always blessed me with much more exciting things than I would have ever thought could happen. So although I'm pretty sad about our youth pastor, I'm pretty excited to see how God will use this to produce even more fruit through him.