Purging

All of us, if we are really God's children--abiding in the True Vine, experience pruning--purging, editing. The word itself has a tendency to scare us. Perhaps we visualize God coming after us with a huge pair of pruning shears to whack away indiscriminately at our lives. In short, we are afraid to trust God with our lives. For isn't that all fear really is--a lack of confidence in an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving God?"
It's true that God sometimes "edits" from our lives things that are in and of themselves "good." To illustrate that necessity, Christ told His disciples that if their eyes or hands offend them, they should cut them off. In other words, if their point of view or their attitude toward Christian service would keep them from being what God wanted them to be, those perceptions and attitudes would have to go. As someone has said, pruning is simply "God doing away with some of me in order to produce more of Him."
You see, God is more interested in what I am--my relationship to Him--than in what I do for Him. He won't stop editing the chapters in my life until there's more of the life of God in me than there is of me. Then, He will be able to do through me, the things that He Himself would do.
All He asks is, "Trust Me."