THE FLOWER THAT COULD

It started with a seed. Jerrie had wanted to plant sunflowers because they were her favorite flower. I bought the seeds and off she went to plant them. She had never gardened so it was not supposed to grow. But, slowly , a few sprouted up from the dirt. They needed to be replanted because they had outgrown their little plastic pots. I bought some bigger pots and Chris, her now boyfriend, repotted them. Everyday we would all go outside to see how the garden was doing. Chris had told us it would start showing fruit in October. But something happened to Jerrie’s flowers. The stems and leaves looked brown and brittle. It just looked like a dead plant. We were all so sad because it was special for Jerrie to have these beautiful, colorful, sunflowers. But Chris continued to water them and keep them in the sunlight. He believed they would still flower. And, they did. Last week I went out to the garden and there it was….a new yellow sunflower. Chris got Jerrie to come down just as the sun was coming up. With such JOY Jerrie saw her new yellow sunflower…the one that we all thought was dead. Have you ever cared about something or someone so much but you just stopped believing anything good could come of it? It looked like there was no hope, no JOY, no happy ending…just a dried up dream. And then there came the master gardener. He knew your heart, your circumstances, your desires…and he kept watering them…day after day. Because he is the master gardener, the final ending of your hopes may be different…but oh so much better. The question is “ Are we willing to trust the master gardener?” I have to say, I was not confident that Chris’s efforts for watering what looked like a dead twig was realistic but he knew more about gardening as evident in the growth of his other plants. As said so many times, “ if you are still alive God is not done with you yet”. God may have to repot us more than once in order for us to continue to grow… to bloom to our most spectacular beauty and fragrance. Don’t give up if your circumstances look hopeless. Like Jerrie’s brilliant yellow sunflower, sometimes it takes longer than we thought, harder than we hoped, and grows differently than we imagined. But in the end, we too will have the same JOY Jerrie has with her new yellow sunflower…just trust the master gardener…