Consider The Lilies (cont.)

Posted on March 11, 2014 by The Writer's Bay

Spring is here! The Garden Center is open once more! And if you disregard our typical bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic Tennessee weather, it’s the best part of the year at last! With spring comes another milestone of the liturgical calendar, as well. Lent has arrived bringing with it a time of reflection and humility. Today, my Bible reading came from Luke 12:27 when Jesus was speaking to the disciples before the multitudes, trying to make them see that they were to put their faith in him before worldly concerns and he would see them through. He told them to “consider the lilies”, and without even realizing it, I found myself considering them too. It is a beautiful, sun-shining day, not a cloud in the sky and all of the colorful buds and blooms proclaiming to the heavens. For a moment, I thought, “It must be so nice to be a flower. No work, no mean-spiritedness to contend with”. They are here for a moment and then they are gone, but oh, what a life to have lived! To spend your whole life basking in the sun and your entire purpose in the world is to show people with your very being, the beauty that God gave you, that he is good, kind Creator. After all, a cruel Master probably wouldn’t create such tiny, lovely, fragile things as this. Then, I realized that, just like those lilies, that was my job too. My purpose in life, too, was to show with my very life that God is my Creator by having just as lovely and cherishing a life as those flowers did. By not only proudly wearing the garb of my faith but by being an ambassador for that faith and showing the world what a disciple should be, I could be just as bright as those lilies.

Even if I was only here for a moment and then gone, Oh what a life to have lived.

Garden Department Adoption Center

Posted on October 6, 2013 by The Writer's Bay

So I’ve decided that the garden center is a lot like an adoption center. People come in and look at the flowers and sometimes they take them home and give them good homes. They take them home and care about them. I came to this conclusion while I was sweeping the center today. At first, I started cleaning because I was bored and if my manager came in and saw me reading I would be reprimanded. However, as I finished my morning prayer as I swept, I was reminded of the little plant I had saved only a few days ago. It had been taken out of one of the eight packs of pansies and left to die by some careless customer in favor of it’s more lovely cousins. An unwanted and unloved, flowerless thing, left behind because someone thought that it was ugly, useless and misbegotten. But I didn’t. I plucked it from certain death and give it a pot here in the center. Five days later, not only was it stronger and healthier but it had a single, bright orange flower. I took it home, loved it and gave it a place of it’s own. The next day, I would find another pansy similarly abandoned and would save it as well. I like to joke that I was running a flower rescue out of the center. It got me thinking about flowers though and if they wanted homes as much as little children did. With that, I started to see the center not as a store selling merchandise but as an adoption center where people came to find something to love a little. And if course every adoption center needed to be clean. If people came and saw that our center is slovenly then they may think our plants are too and not want to take them home! So began my new mission.