I have several flower pots on my back patio that I peruse
every morning. It is a life-infusing
start to my day. I enjoy seeing the
blooms emerge into colorful flowers and watching how various types of flowers differ
from and complement each other. I trim
back the old flowers that have withered and faded and water the plants every
other day. In doing this, I become very
familiar with my flowers. I feel sad
when one struggles and even a bit of personal responsibility if a plant
dies. When my flowers are healthy and
vibrant, I feel a sense of pleasure and well-being.
In one pot, I have some pansies that have survived winter,
and that is quite a feat here in Oklahoma! I put them in the shed last winter, so they
weren’t whipped around by the frigid, north wind, but they still endured sparse
sunlight and very cold temperatures. They
were happy when I brought them back outside in the spring. I could almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief. Needless to say, I am very familiar and
somewhat protective of these pansies.
They are not particularly robust this year and have not grown to fill
the whole pot, but they are still blooming.
There are so many illustrations of spiritual things in
nature. I consider it a gift to see
those parallels, because it helps me better understand the spiritual truths. One morning, two weeks ago, during a routine
watering, I was startled by what I saw. Stretched
in all directions flat across the surface of the soil, in my pansy pot, was a
weed. Why were you startled, you
ask? I was startled, because it caught
me off-guard. This weed covered the full
surface of the dirt. It wasn’t small. And given the size of the weed, it had been
there for several days, yet I had not noticed.
It lay there quietly growing, insidiously disguising itself among the
green leaves of the pansy. Left
unnoticed, it would eventually have choked out the delicate life of the flowers.
Are you seeing the spiritual parallel? Our lives are represented by the pansy. Like a flower we are made to grow and
blossom. We may struggle at times, but
we are designed to thrive and radiate beauty and glorify God. And weeds will come. It’s not a question of if they will come, but
when. Weeds are hearty. They have the ability to grow and reproduce
rapidly. They are capable of blending in
with the plants among which they grow.
And not only blending but intertwining with. When I plucked the weed from my pansy pot, I
had to do it carefully. The weed was the
same color as the leaves of the pansy. As
I searched for the base of the weed, I had to gently pull away the stems of the
flower. Had I not, I would have pulled
part of the flower up with the weed.
