While the boys, their Pop and I picked up all kinds of sticks and debris out of the yard, we stumbled upon a single pink camellia bloom stretching open its petals toward a ray of sunshine. It pains me to think of all the trees and shrubs that are budding and blooming at the moment only to be met with cold weather again, but we’ll certainly enjoy these pretty blooms while we have them.
To my kids, though, the yellow dandelions and purple henbit in our yard are just as special and glorious as any camellia!
Isn’t that much of the beauty of childhood—to see value and interest in nearly every living and natural thing?
My 2-year-old son saw beauty today in the sunshine as it passed through the holes in a withered, crumbling leaf long departed from the branch that once gave it life.
His big brother found a smooth white quartz pebble with a fine crack running along its middle and said not that it was broken but that it looked like it was smiling.
As children, a flower is a flower is a flower … until we learn differently that some blooms are just weeds and pests, not worth our admiration and care but rather our indifference or disdain.
It’s a similar fate with humanity, I think—that as small children we see so much beauty and good and worth and light in each other, but then we do some more living and might learn to hate and reject and mock and hurt others who are different or difficult.
Some of us even learn that it’s OK to hate and reject and mock and inflict harm, unfortunately.
But if we could see each other as our Creator does, with an overwhelming love, devoid of any bias or fear or selfish intent—WOW!
How beautiful and precious we’d seem to one another! Those “weeds” and “holes” and “cracks” suddenly may look more like flowers and windows and smiles, whether genuine or forced through adversity … they’d be seen nonetheless.
That’s something worth striving toward as individuals, I think, even if we know we’ll never quite get it completely right.
A work in progress is no small thing!
God’s grace, mercy and love are no small things. So we bloom despite the coming frost.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Feature photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash
