Often we plan out our lives and our jobs and our purpose, but rarely do our lives actually work out how we plan them. In this video, speaker and author, Kelly Minter, tells the story of how God took her plan of being a music artist and changed it for the better.
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The entire video is above, and the transcript is below.
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We often make these plans for our lives and we draw them out, even meticulously, and a lot of times-at least for me-things don't go as I planned them.
When I was younger I moved to Nashville a number of years ago and I had really detailed plans for a career in music. I’d actually signed record deal and I was super excited about that because I had the record deal in place and I was coming to Nashville, Music City, U.S.A. I was going to sing and song write and I was so excited because the plan and the road seemed really straight like it was headed straight for success.
I got to town and within six months my record company was bought out and their new artists were dropped. So really quickly I found myself in a situation where my life was not at all going as planned.
There are many different passages in Scripture I could point to, but what I want to point to today is out of John 15. And if you just look at those first few verses it's really Jesus talking about the reality that He is the Vine and we are the branches. And you probably have heard that before, that we're the branches. We're attached to the True Vine, which is Jesus Christ.
However, there is another character, if you will, in that metaphor and it is God the Father who is the Vinedresser. He is the one who dresses the Vine and He is the one who prunes the branches.
So when I looked at that I realized that God is the one who prunes us and oftentimes when He prunes us He changes our path. And it's not just that He prunes sin out of our lives. He also prunes, not just the bad for the good, but the good for the better.
So for me that's what had happened with my music career. It wasn't that it was a bad thing, but He was pruning that out for something better. It was a few years later that I began to write Bible studies and write books and then to go and to teach. I will tell you that that was not an easy surrender to me. It was not easy to surrender myself to the Vinedresser.
But there's something really important in that passage at the top of chapter 15 where Jesus says that the reason that God the Father is the Vinedresser and the reason that He prunes the branches is so that we can bear, not just fruit in our lives, but so that we can bear more fruit. So when things in our lives don't go as planned so often that is an opportunity for us to surrender ourselves to God the Pruner, to the God the Vinedresser, so that our lives can actually bear more fruit.
I hope that that's encouraging for you to take peace in that and to be able to look and go, "You know what? God has not lost control of my life." He is the perfect Pruner and anything that He is taking away or changing it's so that that we will bear fruit, more fruit, and fruit that will last.