One recent afternoon, we heard a loud ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ at our front door and found our lovely friend there, holding a small, glass vase in her hand that contained a beautiful, pink camelia and some dainty, little blue flowers.
‘This is for you,’ she told me. ‘Someone gave me this camelia and it’s so perfect, I thought you would enjoy it too. The little blue flowers are forget-me-nots.’
After she left, I sat gazing at those beautiful flowers for a long time. The camelia was indeed exquisite, almost salmon pink in colour, with each petal overlapping the next in such an orderly, perfect way and changing to a lighter shade as the petals spiralled out from the centre. But the forget-me-nots captured my attention too, the dainty, baby-blue flowers in each cluster absolutely perfect in themselves, with their bright yellow centres and white, starlike markings on the tiny petals. How could so much beauty exist in such minuscule form? Surely only the hand of a loving, overwhelmingly creative God could produce something amazing like this?
I remembered then the first few lines of a poem I wrote some years ago on this same theme:
Did you have fun, Lord, creating such beauty
for us your children to enjoy?
It’s as if in pure delight you waved your palette high
and splashed your vibrant colours everywhere with glee,
as if you had to share each fresh design of flower
and then, in pure extravagance,
add speckles to already perfect petals.
Truly, the natural world around us brims with wonderful extravagances of colour and design and intricacy. And it has always blown my mind that many of the tiny flowers and plants and animals and insects created by God will never even be seen by human beings. Perhaps their habitat is some hidden corner in a jungle or some isolated spot in a dry, desert area, far from any sort of civilisation—yet still they flourish. Thomas Gray expressed this same thought in his poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ which I remember being drawn to in my early teens when we studied it in our English class:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
But, above all, as I sat gazing at my little posy, I remembered some words Jesus once said that encourage us not to worry:
And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” Matthew 6:28-30
I continued sitting there for some time, sensing God’s presence around me and taking in the lesson I was doubtless being taught through my special flowers. Yes, I could indeed trust God to provide for me and those close to me in every way. I need not worry, because I belong to a loving, creative God who is more than able to care for me—and for you. Surely a lesson worth learning all over again, don’t you think?
Jo-Anne Berthelsen's Blog 