Emotional Bonsai

I have a confession to make, I use to be an emotional bonsai. This is not to be mistaken for being a lukewarm or cold Christian, I was just small in my emotional depth, if not completely lacking. I was a fairly pleasant person, but emotionally small. Never too angry, or too happy, or too excited, too compassionate, everything was proportional and quite measured. What I didn't understand was that my experiences were small...bonsai.

I have seen a ten year old apple tree in a three gallon pot that looked perfect. It had beautiful flowers and a wonderfully proportioned trunk and perfectly trained and formed branches. It even gave edible apples in season, but this tree stood 18-24 inches tall. It really was amazing. This was not a pygmy tree or an unusually small variety of apple tree, this was a garden variety tree that would have been a least ten feet tall if it had a normal life growing in an orchard.

So what makes a bonsai? Pruning the top part of the tree has some bearing on the size of the tree, but the real trick to keeping it small (bonsai) is in the roots. The roots have to be pruned and contained. Restrict the roots and you keep the tree from growing to normal size. The life is in the roots. See any parallel to emotional and spiritual growth? My roots were pruned and contained early in life. It was all I knew and I might have stayed that way.

Personally, my lack of growth was due to being emotionally stunted at a very young age. I will not offer details other than I did not receive what I needed when I was very young. By the time I was thirty, I started to figure out that I was a little different. I felt like I was always watching and never really connecting. I didn't cry and my responses to emotional hurt or joy was a measured intellectual response of sadness or laughter. I really didn't feel anything deeply till God changed me.

Eight years ago during a very deep crisis of faith, God healed and changed me. It has been the single most significant event in my life. It truly was like being born again. The person I used to be is no longer. Today, I feel and respond without trying to figure out how. Life is sooo different now than before.

A year before I was healed I was hurting. I wanted to run and quit church, quit my marriage, and start all over. I was suffering and I told God to "change me or my circumstances, but I needed change!!" It was a hard year and I nearly walk away from God, friends, and my wife of fifteen years. Though she loved me dearly, my wife didn't like me much that year. I wasn't a very nice person to live with for most of that year. Though I didn't see it, God used that year to prepare my heart for dramatic change. When I came to the end of myself, I was ready.

During a special church service I was prayed over by the guest speaker and I couldn't stay standing (did carpet time). When I hit the floor, I felt a love and a joy I had not felt before. I began to laugh and laugh and laugh. It emotionally felt like my Father in Heaven was blowing bubbles on my tummy, like a father does to his little laughing baby. I was loved!!! After many sessions of much laughter and joy, I knew that I knew of my Father's deep..deep love for me and from there I started to grow.

It is eight years later and I am still maturing. The laughter has cooled but the joy remains. I'm a bigger tree with much deeper roots and growing fruit. My marriage is stronger and I cry at Disney movies and feel compassion when I see another's pain. I am a loved son of the Father, and over the past few years He has brought me more and more into His business to love people. I find it difficult to otherwise explain what happened to me other than "I was blind and now I see," and I was lame and now I can walk.

Suffering and feeling compassion towards others is now an opportunity for my roots to grow and reach for the deep things in God. I will not say that I am always ready to choose suffering, but I hear God's voice beckoning and encouraging me to trust and send my roots deeper still into Him. I love Him and I will follow. I choose to go on and be healed and be whole. I am no longer an emotional bonsai, I am free to grow.

This has been my story, but we all have fears and hurts that keep us from growing. I know that our Father God wants to help us all to be more than we can ever imagine. His love, His mercy, and His grace are always there to help us grow. Its true, believe it!