Crushed

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.

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