Thanks for loving me enough to cut me down

While hitchhiking yesterday, Lauren and I were picked up by a smart British man who loved talking. He shared a lot of political information, but then began sharing his core life philosophies. He began talking about how you can never know where life will take you. "You reach forks in the road, and turn left or right. You can only know if it was the right choice after a long time has passed and you can look back retrospectively."

He then said something that was precisely what I needed to hear: "The greatest growth you'll experience in your life will be during the times you feel you are having everything taken away from you. Looking back, those choices that seem to cut you down, those times when things are the hardest and you are facing adversity are the times that you'll realize are the ones that really got you somewhere."

I've recently felt like much has been "taken away" from me. I've known from the beginning that it was God's plan for me, and that He has a wiser purpose and grander vision of my life than I ever could; but I've still felt recently like I've been taking steps "backward" in life, rather than forward. I've questioned God's planning often lately; not skeptically, but wondering if I've just lost my path. "Am I going the right way, God? because it feels like things are falling apart for me more than coming together right now," have been some recent thoughts.

I'm thankful for a wife who may not think like me, but has amazing and broad vision of what is really important and good. She is the bird's eye view of perspective when I'm the worm's eye view of specificity. I'm grateful to have a companion that makes up for my weaknesses. I'm grateful to a Heavenly Father who isn't afraid to cut me down. He loves me enough to chasten me (Mosiah 23: 21-22; D&C 101: 5; Hebrews 12: 10)

Like Hugh B. Brown, I am grateful to the Gardener who knows what kind of plant He wants me to grow into. It's not an easy or fun process to be clipped, pruned, chopped, and beautified by the Master Gardener. It hurts to be cut down sometimes, maybe only because we are worried about what the other plants in the garden will think of us now that we're cut down. But He knows exactly what we can become, and what we should become!