Flowers and Faith.

I love flowers. Any one who really knows me, knows that. I would take flowers over chocolate, over money, and yes, even over coffee. For my birthday, I received flowers from many of my sweet friends and from my family. My room looked like a funeral home, and smelled like Spring. One of my favorite things about flowers is that they are completely irrational and impractical. They really area waste of money. Think about it; flowers grow naturally, someone cuts them out of the ground, wraps them in tissue paper, and charges you $20 for it. Shortly afterward, they die and you're left with yet another vase that you don't have cupboard space for and yet don't feel justified throwing it away.

My birthday flowers died quite a while ago, but I just thew them out. I know ... impractical. But that's what I love. As I was sorting through them, I noticed some were still alive; not wilted, not dry, but vibrant and sweet-smelling. I tried to pull the live ones out because they were so few, but each time I did they would get stuck in a stiff dead stem and their petals would be plucked out or their leaves ripped to shreds. Eventually, I found that if I pulled the dead flowers out one by one, they live ones would be safe.

The process took far longer than I hoped; this is the impractical part of flowers I don't enjoy quite so much. But I've been thinking about that situation for while. It's like us, you know? Well, like me, at least. Lately, I'm finding a lot of dead areas in my life. There's a lot of decay, a lot of brokenness, a lot of wilting. For a while, I thought I was all dead; my spirit seemed to have wilted, my prayer life was stale, and my spirituality lost all sent of Jesus.

But I'm discovering little bits of life, too; remnants of the celebration years I had with Jesus. I've tried to capitalize on those places in my life: I'm seeing hope in my life again, so I'll just be really good at hoping; I still love the girls on my floor, so I'll pour all of myself into loving them. The problem is, the dead stuff didn't go away. On the contrary, it's ripping at the living places and threatening to shred my growth.

You know where this is going, don't you...


I'm inviting God to do a rending work in me. I'm asking Him to pull out the death in my soul. One by one, lie by lie, wound by wound. Ignorance is not bliss, it's a slow and foul death. But, family, we have a Healing God. We serve the One who restores, breathes new life, forms, heals, reconciles, and delivers.

My bouquet is is being sorted, uprooted, parsed out, and after this long process it will be much smaller. But we also serve a planting God, the One who creates new life and calls it good. I pray it will be so.