Grafting

"You will say then, "Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in." Romans 11:19

Have you ever worked in an orchard? Pruning? Thinning? Picking fruit? Clean up? An orchard is a busy place almost year round! Now that March is here, the trees are budding. Before we know it, the apricots will be blossoming, then plums & cherries, peaches & apples. Its such a place of beauty! We had the good fortune of renting a home on an orchard for a year. It was such a treat to have access to the beauty & our pick of the fresh fruits. I thought it would be a place of tranquility as well.

But the only time an orchard lies quiet is a month or two of rest in the winter. Then the clean up & pruning starts, once the buds start blossoming, then the thinning & cultivating will start. There is always something to be done in an orchard. Tractors running, sprayers spraying, fruit trucks coming & going. It was FAR from peaceful!

When I was a teenager, my brother & I worked in an apple orchard near our home for a summer. We were too young (small) to do any good for PICKING the fruit but we were involved in many odd jobs that orchard upkeep requires. For instance, we spent a day or two painting the lower trunks of new trees white. I think this had something to do with pest control. We also got to tie back branches of young trees to promote a certain growth style.

The task I remember the most was grafting. We'd take a fresh bud, cut a slit into a very young tree & seal the bud into the slit. Eventually, it would become part of the tree. Farmers do this for a few reasons, a stronger type of fruit grafted into a weaker tree can aid in strengthening the whole tree. This can also be done to create new varieties of fruit. A new flavour of apple perhaps, or even by combining two completely different fruits to produce a new one. Some grafted branches can be supported by a different type of tree but still produce the fruit they were intended to. It amazed me how a tree would accept this 'foreign invasion' and allow it to grow & be nourished, instead of killing off the area of the graft & rejecting the new branch.

Many things in life can be related to grafting. In the very literal sense, there is skin grafting for people who have had severe burns or wounds. Relationships like adoption or even marriages can be compared to grafting. The acceptance of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life also. I'll leave it open to your own analogy.