August is a gift. My wife's sweet peas (and other flowers) in our backyard are in full bloom. LaRee knows they are my favourite flower (they are her's too.) She picks them and puts them in vases and jars throughout our house. Their beautiful pastel colours and sweet scent fill the rooms just as they do to the warm fresh air in the yard.
The humble sweet pea has much to teach me about life (if I allow them to speak to me). God can, if I let Him, use a flower to teach me about His nature through nature. He is, after all, the Creator of it all. Case in point: A bouquet of simple sweet peas shows me that simple beauty is the best beauty. That is a truth about most of life. Simple love is the best love. Sadly, people rush about their busy lives oblivious to God's wisdom to be found in a lowly sweet pea or countless wild flowers growing along roads and walking trails. People quickly drive or walk by them without a thought about the wisdom and beauty to be found in a flower's simpleness. (The same is true of quietude.)
Twenty-first century people do not tend to value simpleness. They pervert simple beauty into gaudy, vulgar counterfeits of beauty. They take simple pure love and twist it into something ugly by unfaithfulness, betrayal, lust and all sorts of deviations from pure simple love. They change pure love into something unworthy of the word pure or love—and a thousand miles from the Creator of love.
And yet, when all the deviations and complications of life are stripped away — as coronavirus may yet do to you and me — it becomes clear that it was only simple beauty and simple love that mattered all along!
Isn't that part of the charm of babies? Their simple innocent beauty and openness to love calls you and me to remember our own early beautiful innocence and openness to love that was source of our joy. Joy is so natural to babies and tiny children but later is driven away when their hearts become broken, jaded, or cynical. Hearts hardened by betrayal, jealousy, selfishness or disappointment with life can only remember and experience faint momentary inklings of real Joy. Otherworldly Joy of God is a distant memory of earliest childhood.
That's why I think that sweet peas and tiny babies still call you and me back to the purity of simple beauty and simple love. That is where authentic Joy is to be found, It can be a constant state of being for hearts at peace with God though His Son Jesus Christ.
Let the COVID lockdown be a time to quiet your heart and search for God. He is near and He cares for you and me.
"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life or what you will eat, or about your your body and what you will wear. For your life is more than food and the body more than clothing. ... Notice how the flowers grow. They do not toil or spin. But I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of them. If God clothes the grass that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not provide much more for you, O you of little faith." —Jesus Christ, (Luke 12.22-23, 27-28.)
MDP
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