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The park near myself is beautiful to run. But can be basically a mud run much of the year. The good news is that after you have run it once you know where the slip and slides are. And that is one option in life – you can do something more than once to figure out the best way to do it. That’s Option 1. Option 2 is to speak to someone who has “made that run” before and get their insight. The obvious issue that people have fault memories, different capacities and tolerances. For example, some people can run along four-inch landscaping timber and avoid the mud...others will fall in. But the best option in life is to speak with Jesus – Someone Who knows everything about everything and everything about us (whether you can run along the landscaping ties or this will cause you to end up face-down in the mud). “And yet,” I thought as I ran. “How often we ignore Option 3.”   The hyacinths came with my apartment. (For which I am grateful because there is no way I would have planted them.) For two Marchs they have blossomed, big and beautiful and BIG. So big that the weight of the flowers filled with water, pulls them into the dirt with the first substantial rain...and because it is often raining, the blooms are doomed to be forever horizontal.
“So sad.” I thought surveying the carnage. But then I smelled a fragrance I hadn’t smelled before. The crushed flowers smelled like a greenhouse. The damage made them sweeter. May the trials in our lives do likewise and make us sweeter in the face of what should destroy. And help us more fully fulfill the purposes Christ has given us -- even when bent under the weight of storms. Spring has sprung in the Pacific Northwest. It’s still rainy and gloomy, but things are blooming. Some things are green and leafy and expected to bloom. But other things are brown and dry. It’s startling. Luscious blossoms emerging from sticks. To the point where a tree that appears dead is cloaked in stunning color. This is the way God works. We look around and say, “Oh, this will end well. But that [person, situation, choice] is hopeless.” Not to a Savior Who makes sticks flower.  It was a perfect cherry blossom...and yet it would never make a cherry because it had let go of the tree. How appropriate Christ's analogy is: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing." (John 15:5) My little flower would never be pollinated or fruit, because though it was lovely and fragrant -- without the tree it would never become what it was made it to be. In fact, it would even cease to be what it was because life comes through the tree. So, we too are granted life through Christ and to let go of Him is to choose to "do nothing" and give up our purpose to bear Him fruit. Or we can cling to the vine and allow the Vinedresser to bring forth the fruit of His choosing.  |
The AuthorCome with me as we grow in fellowship with each other and our Savior to whom belongs the Amazing Escape from sin and death and the Amazing Journey into glorious life. Archives
November 2025
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