Beauty out of Dry Ground.

                                                           

    I have been growing amaryllis lilies in pots this year. A friend who was moving away from the district gave me several of these beautiful plants of hers which I had always admired, and I didn’t want to miss a minute of their beauty. So when the flowers began to come, they were brought in to the living room so we could watch them open and develop.

   It always amazes me how such beauty can come out the same soil….how do these plants know when the right time to grow is? How do they know when to send up their flower shoots? Yet each year, we could almost set our clock by them! We have a lot of a certain type of cherry tree that grows wild around our town…how do they know when July comes and that it is time to  begin to flower?

     There is the Belladonna lily that follows a  regular pattern too…every year without fail it sends up long stalks from the ground with its flowers of either pink or white. There are no leaves around this flower stalk and it stands up stark and naked on its own. After two or three weeks, the flower dies down, and the plant is dormant again until about July when the first leaves start to appear. It is a very luxurious looking plant, quite handsome in fact, and fills the empty gaps in the garden. Then about October the leaves start  to go brown and die down, and the whole plant goes to sleep. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you would think the plant had died! But when the next February comes, the whole cycle starts again!

    The creativity of God to put these patterns into the plants He has designed, is amazing!  When we stop to think about it, everything He has made is amazing. Mankind is no less amazingly made, and it is a lesson to us to look for the hidden talents that each one of us has, and to use them for God’s glory. No matter what our surroundings are or the environment we are in, there is always something we can thank Him for. As the Bible says, “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

If you think that you don’t have anything you can do, we can ALL give praise and thanks to Him for what we see in His creation around us!!  (Philippians 4:20)

Fragmented!

    Our government has decided in its wisdom that gatherings in general (and churches in particular) are not to meet in numbers greater than twenty-five for unvaccinated people, and one hundred for those who are vaccinated. This means that for a lot of organisations, the people have had to look at how to divide their gatherings and yet keep the overall unity of the whole group together. This is no mean feat, as people tend to gravitate towards those they know best, and hesitate to join those who they don’t know so well.

   But we need to look at the wider picture, and think of some positives of such a move. Firstly, it gives us a chance to get to know other people better…there is nothing like a small group to activate conversation by asking questions and really listening to the answers. Then others who may irritate us somewhat, give us a chance to exercise Christian grace and patience, and to look beneath the surface of remarks we may not agree with. There is one thing to remember….always look at the half cup of drink in front of you as being half full and not half empty!!

    Then again, there is the prospect of road blocks facing those who travel over our holiday period, and the frustration this will generate….another time of exercising grace and patience!

So whatever our particular test will be, let us remember the wider picture and learn some benefit from it, rather than just grinning and bearing it ungraciously!!!