A couple of days ago while taking a morning walk around Karen’s gardens, I was reminded of something Lindsey Dolan told me at Anthony and Jennifer (Hendricks) Skinner’s wedding reception this past Saturday. Lindsey and some of our other Christian friends recently completed the grueling 232-miles of Montana’s Headwaters Relay.
After reminding Lindsey that she and the rest of the team are all crazy, I asked her about the difficulties of mountain-running in hot weather, and she shared with me one focus that helped carry her through. As she pressed forward to do her part for their eight-member relay team, Lindsey kept taking happy note of the panoramas around her and celebrating in her thoughts Romans 1:21:
“…since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made….”
As the beauty of Karen’s sunlit plants and flowers enriched my soul during that morning stroll, I reflected on Lindsey’s Romans verse and found myself singing Albert S. Williams’ country song from the 1950s: “How Can You Say There Is No God?” Here are the first three lines:
“Each little flower within my garden,
Each little sparrow that’s playing there
Proclaims the love of my matchless Savior….”
From a plant one might not expect to generate such pretty blooms, have sprung in Karen’s garden beds the delicate little flowers shown above. How they captured my admiring attention, and how they did proclaim to me the “love of my matchless Savior”!
Just as we see the Lord often take loving control of common people around us and transform their lives into unexpected beauty, so the “mystery blooms” you see in my photo have been created by God through budding a stem I might once have thought incapable of such a delicate floral display. And even for this once barefoot, run-of-the-mill Aussie boy, there is a message of joy from those little blossoms as they blend in my grateful thoughts with lines from another song:
“Something beautiful, something good;
All my confusion He understood.
All I had to offer Him
Was brokenness and strife,
But He made something beautiful of my life.” 1
Two questions:
1. What are a couple of unexpected ways in which you have seen our Lord transform you or someone you know?
2. Can you identify the common name of the plant genus that produced the “mystery blooms” in the photo above? ICF will award a little prize to the first person who responds correctly in the comments section below!
Update: this small contest is now closed. Thank you for your entries and comments, and congratulations to our winner, Monte Pocock!
