What if every painful thing in my life is the ridding or the exercising of a demon? What if things, ways, tendencies need to get painfully hacked off because they are too overgrown to pull back? What if I am not strong, wise, or intelligent enough to make some of those decisions myself and I needed a pruner to do it to me, for me? And what if that pruner happened to have a vision for a garden that shattered all pictures of life and livelihood that I had in my current framework?

What if, along the way, I had positioned things as important and worthy – stability, security, someone else’s perfect. What if I needed to see and know those aren’t the point? So what if those pains, the stripping away, the scars from the pruner’s butchering – it all lead to freedom? The pain was a sacrifice that gave birth to better? What if…

What if, in going through pain and getting glimpses of ‘better,’ I also came to know the pruner better? Got snapshots or glimpses of the plan. Saw the intent behind the hacking? Saw the intimacy of how uniquely it was all created for me. Could I trust? Is it possible that one day, I could live understanding that every pain, frustration, fear, anxiety, or failure could be the trigger for another one of those damn weeds that has grown up around my ankle, or even my throat, to get a good hacking?