Monsignor Pope Ping!
I’d say there is definitely a pruning going on right now.
Reminds me of a 20th Century hymn in the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship:
Amid the world’s bleak wildderness
A vineyard grows with promise green,
The planting of the Lord himself.
His love selected this terrain
His vine with love he planted here
To bear the choicest fruit for him.
We are his branches, chosen, deaer,
And though we feel the dresser’s knife,
We are the objects of his care.
From him we draw the juice of life,
For him supply his winery
With fruit from which true joys derive.
Vine, keep what I was meant to be:
Your branch, with your rich life in me.
It is the noxious weeds growing inside the Church *cough*franky*cough* that seem to be doing the most damage.
Thanks for this!
From where I sit, I have to wonder if indeed the US itself might well be Asyria.