03/08/2025 – “The Errant Flower”
I went outside to my front yard after a huge windstorm, just to see how many broken branches had been tossed around and were lying on the ground, or if my empty plastic flowerpots had rolled like tumbleweed into my neighbor’s yard. There was still a remnant of last year’s mulch packed down into former flowerbeds that was so old and compressed it hadn’t even budged in the wind.
As I looked around, what caught my eye was one lonely, purple crocus waving at me in the afternoon’s breeze. It was almost as if it was saying, “Don’t worry, new life is beginning, spring is almost here, things that seemed dead are stirring and waking up!”
There really isn’t anything surprising about a crocus spontaneously popping up after a few early warm days – nothing surprising at all. It’s nice to have that reminder that gentle days are coming. The surprise is . . . I have never planted any crocuses. Ever. I have no idea where it came from. It’s not the first of last year’s flowers that was anxious to pop back up. No one gave me a bouquet of flowers that dried up eventually and had shed some seeds. This little stranger was deliberately pushing itself up through dry, packed clay dirt and very thin, dry mulch. There had been no rain for weeks, and I had not watered flowers since the end of summer. This little flower stranger was a volunteer visitor with no family, no relatives, no relationship to the stark, hibernating emptiness all around it.
How many times have we felt surrounded by dry, infertile land with opportunities that have either dried up or have not had the chance to start? Have we felt that the best is over, we have to start building from scratch (if at all), or what’s the point?
There is a point. God does not need our input, our experience, our expertise, or even our past to create our future out of nothing. I have never planted anything in my yard other than begonias, azaleas, a peony bush, and a tree. I do put out pots of chrysanthemums. That’s it. I have never planted a crocus in the middle of a very weather-worn yard. But God intended for it to be there. I had nothing to do with it
God has plans for every one of us, whether we think so or not. Whatever you think really has little to do with it. Sometimes our past can be used to guide our path; often we learn from our hardships and use them as strengths for what’s up ahead. But nothing that happens in life is a surprise to God, because He designed our lives to be our unique fingerprint in the world. We might continue on in a similar way as we go, or we might jump into another boat. We can plan arrange, manipulate, even put a deposit on a time-share, but we absolutely cannot create a life from where there was none. Only God, the Creator, can defy our own finite sense of logic to speak something into being that is beyond our most imaginative expectations.
Only God creates a beautiful flower out of dead, dry land where we have never thought to plant any seeds.
Dance on.
Grace Notes 