February, inside Family Simple is a heart month.

We are continuing our conversation around:

• Recognizing the season you’re in
• The art of pruning
• What healthy growth actually looks like
• How internal work changes the atmosphere of our homes

Before we declutter closets in March, we’re decluttering reactions, habits, and heart patterns in February.

Quiet work. Deep roots. Steady growth.

February on Family Simple is an invitation to cultivate what is happening beneath the surface — embracing the pruning, strengthening the roots, and trusting the slow work of growth through simple and honest reflection. Below you will find the links for each episode released during the month of February:

These conversations are meant to be listened to slowly, as encouragement, not instruction, and to meet you wherever you are right now.

A Time to Plant, A Time to Uproot
By Crystal

“There is a time for everything… a time to plant and a time to uproot.”

— Ecclesiastes 3

As I sit with the pruning season that is going on within me, I’m reminded of something simple but strong: if I stop allowing the pruning process to take place… what use am I?

That question isn’t harsh. It’s honest. Because if we resist the cutting, we resist the fruit.

Pruning feels like winter. Quiet. Still. Sometimes exposing. Things look bare. It can feel like loss. But what I’m realizing is that growth is not necessarily easier.

Now that we have pruned, reflected, and cleaned house, we have to move forward into growth. And growth feels a little like walking into a new school.

You step through the doors and everything is unfamiliar. The hallways echo differently. The lockers stretch longer than you expected. The bell rings and your heart jumps. You don’t know the rhythm yet. You don’t know where you’re headed.

You stand in the middle of the hallway and for a moment… you spin.

You turn one way.
Then another.
Searching for something steady.

Where is my classroom?
Where do I plant my feet?
What does normal look like here?

Your thoughts move fast. You don’t want to respond the wrong way. You don’t want to fall back into old habits. You don’t want to overreact. You don’t want to disappear either. So you spin, trying to find your rooted space in a place that doesn’t feel rooted yet.

That’s what growth after pruning feels like.

Everything familiar has been uprooted. The responses that once came automatically don’t feel right anymore. The old tone doesn’t fit. The old patterns feel too sharp, too reactive. But the new patterns aren’t instinctive yet either.

So you stand in the hallway — spinning a little inside — trying to plant your feet in something steadier.

And in that moment, you look for a kind face. Someone grounded. Someone who signals safety. Someone who reminds you that you are not lost — you are learning.

Jesus says in John 15 that the Father prunes the branches so they can bear more fruit. The cutting is not random. It is intentional. The Gardener sees what we cannot yet see.

Winter pruning makes the garden look bare. The flowers are cut back. It can appear lifeless. But beneath the soil, something is happening. The roots are strengthening. Energy is being redirected. The plant is conserving what it needs to bloom again.

Spring doesn’t burst in all at once.

First, stillness.
Then, a small green shoot.
Then, a bud.
Then, bloom.

The hallway and the garden tell the same story.

You were pruned in winter.
Now you are learning how to root differently in spring.

When your thoughts start spinning, you don’t have to panic. You don’t have to run back to what felt familiar just because it was comfortable. You can slow down. You can stop turning in circles. You can plant your feet.

If you feel like you are standing in that hallway right now — pruned but not fully grown yet — you are not unfinished. You are being prepared.

Growth is harder than I expected. It is harder to respond calmly when I want to react. It is harder to set boundaries earlier. It is harder to strengthen my internal world instead of leaning on someone else to steady it for me.

But this is the kind of fruit I want. The kind that lasts.

The flower dies in winter.
And in the spring, a new flower blooms.

The Gardener is patient.
And spring always comes.

Trust the Blade
By Aaron

On the podcast this month, Crystal has been examining the rhythms of growth and pruning. Allow me to spend a few of your valuable minutes to talk about pruning: why it is so important, why we overlook it, and how to actually submit to it.

In an orchard or a vineyard, pruning removes material from the vine or tree. Since we obviously aren’t planning to trim any of our fingers off, what are we actually removing when we walk through a season of pruning?

In John 15:1–2 ESV, Jesus says:

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit."

It is worth noting that Jesus is speaking to His disciples at the Last Supper, right after He washed their feet. He knows He is about to die, and He is giving them His parting wisdom. If you want to really feel the heart of God, spend a few more of your valuable minutes reading John chapters 13 through 17. You could spend a lifetime studying and living from these few chapters.

I want you to see something specific in verse 2, though. We often focus on the cautionary words about the branches that don’t bear fruit. Jesus drives that nail home later in verse 6, saying those branches are burned. We certainly don’t want that! But notice that the Father prunes the good branches so that they produce even more fruit. Maybe you are a dead branch, and if so, you need to deal with that—but we should not automatically think that when the Vinedresser comes to clean us up, we are being discarded.

Pruning is the reward for fruitfulness.

So, what is the problem? We would much rather just grow. We are naturally biased toward the "planting" and the "growing." Growth seasons are fun. They feel exciting, measurable, and give us that sense of purpose we crave. Our society—and usually our own egos—celebrates expansion. We want to grow our portfolios, our careers, our families, and our influence.

It is incredibly difficult to discern a pruning season when the noise of our own ambition is too loud. We exist in a condition of perpetually looking for "more," and we’ve been taught to fear stagnation. But there is a dangerous reality we often ignore: without the work of pruning, our growth eventually becomes a façade—tall and impressive on the outside, but structurally hollow and ready to snap under its own weight.

A False Façade

About 12 years ago, I started building a portfolio of student rental properties. I had spent years studying real estate investment strategies, and I had finally arrived at a point where I could begin acquiring properties. On the outside, it looked like the ultimate success—I was acquiring properties at a staggering rate, fueled by private money investors and an overgrown vision. I felt like I was killing it! It felt good!

But the reality was a dangerous façade. My business was tall and impressive, but it was structurally hollow. I had allowed the leader branches of expansion to grow wild, I tried to ignore the dead wood that I didn't have solutions for, and I mistakenly believed that the sucker branches of debt and more houses were real growth. I didn’t want to hear the word "no" or "slow down." At the time, pruning the business back to a manageable, healthy size felt like defeat.

Uhltown Rentals eventually crumbled under its own weight. I didn’t just lose a business; I lost the façade of my success. I had to learn the hard way that a smaller, pruned orchard that actually produces fruit is infinitely better than a massive forest of dead wood.

The Vinedresser/Orchardist/Pruner

The pruning lesson of Uhltown was physical, out in the world for all to see. Most of the time though, the leaders, suckers, and dead wood are in our minds and our hearts—hidden away, easy to ignore, and much harder to give over to the Orchardist.

To understand what we are actually giving over, we have to look at the actions of an orchardist; every snip is a strategic redirection of life. There are three primary ways a tree or a vine is pruned to ensure it doesn't become a Uhltown.

A tree naturally wants to grow upward as fast as possible to reach the sun. It sends all its energy to the leader branch at the very top. Left to its own devices, the tree becomes leggy—tall, thin, and unable to support its own weight. By removing that leader, the orchardist forces the tree to redirect energy outward into lateral branches, creating a stronger, more accessible structure.

Sometimes we have to cut our top ambitions—the things that make us look tall and successful to others—so we can build the lateral strength and character needed to actually support the weight of our responsibilities.

A dense, overgrown tree is a death trap for fruit. If the canopy is too thick, sunlight can’t reach the center and air can't circulate. This creates a dark, damp environment where fungus and disease thrive. Pruning opens up the "heart" of the tree, allowing the sun to hit every branch and the wind to dry out moisture that would otherwise rot the crop.

We often overgrow our schedules or our egos until no light can get into our internal lives. Pruning is about creating space for airflow—accountability, rest, and clarity—so we don't rot from the inside while looking healthy on the outside.

Apple trees grow water sprouts or suckers—thin, vertical shoots that grow rapidly out of the main branches. They look like growth, but they will never produce fruit. They are biological vampires; they suck nutrients away from the fruit-bearing wood.

We all have sucker branches in our lives—habits, commitments, or even relationships that look like activity but produce zero fruit. Pruning these isn't losing; it’s reclaiming the currency of your time and energy for what actually matters.

The Beauty of the Skeletal Season

If you’ve ever driven past an orchard in late February, you’ve seen the aftermath of a massive pruning. It looks like a massacre. There are piles of wood on the ground, and the trees themselves look skeletal, scarred, and diminished. If you didn’t know the orchardist’s intent, you would think the orchard was being destroyed.

Likewise, the seasons of pruning in our own lives are usually painful. They leave us feeling exposed and unbeautiful. We lose the lushness of our previous season’s busyness, but in the orchard, that ugliness is actually honesty. The tree is no longer pretending to be bigger than its roots can support. It is down to the essentials.

In Ecclesiastes 3:9-11 NLT it says:

“What do people really get for all their hard work? I have seen the burden God has placed on us all. Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.

We must "rest in the wonder" of the eternity that He has placed in our hearts. The tree can’t see the form of its branches. We are like a tree trying to see what the top branches need from the base of the trunk. The pruning shears look like a threat because we can't see the delicate work that is needed at the top of the tree, but we do see the branches falling to the ground. Rest in the wonder of admitting that sometimes, we won't understand why God is making us face this or that part of our life and cut it away. It looks like destruction from ground level, but we have to trust that the Orchardist has the perspective that we can’t possess.

Pruning is the act of aligning our time with God’s timing. We stop trying to grow in every direction at once, vegetative growth, and allow God to focus us on reproductive balance that will “bear more fruit”. “God has made everything beautiful for its own time.”

So, the next time you feel beat up, broken, or 'lesser than' you were a season ago, don't rush to fix it. Don't try to duct-tape the old branches back on. Take a deep breath. Rest in the wonder that you are being handled by a Master who cares too much about your fruit to let you waste your life on leaves. Trust the blade. The flowers are coming.

Thank you for being here.

Family Simple — encouragement for the life you're building.