Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Smell the Flowers, Don't Eat Them

Easter and Spring bring back the flowers. It is so uplifting to have their colors, shapes and aromas to grace our church and gardens. They remind us of God’s gifts of beauty in our world. They soften any environment dressed by their blooms, and they are a concrete sign that the long winter has passed and more new life is to come. We enjoy the sight and smell of blooming plants, and welcome what they add to what can be just ordinary and dull surroundings. Flowers make an occasion special and memorable. Perhaps that is why we often use them to mark a birthday, a wedding or holiday. They dress up the setting—unless you are Baxter.

Baxter likes flowers and plants, but for a different reason. He eats them. I can’t have any living foliage around the house, if I want it to survive. Baxter ignores any “Don’t Touch!” prohibitions, and seems to miss any aesthetic value to natural greenery. To him, it is all salad to be chomped on and add variety to a boring diet of kibble and water. Plants and their blooms don’t have a chance for peaceful coexistence with this herbivore. What we might see as delicate beauty with rich color, Baxter sees as an additional course at dinner. There’s no teaching him otherwise.

We can often limit our perception of people and circumstances in the same way. We see things for what we want them tobe and how they will serve our purposes, and we miss what they might add to our lives. In a sense, we consume them with our selfish motives, and fail to see what they might contribute of their unique beauty. So we have turf wars. No one can do what I do the way I do it. If they try, it is not as good or downright wrong. We get jealous and envious that others are honing in on our territory, so we make them feel uncomfortable. We gossip about others. It is a way of eating up their good reputation so that they won’t be appreciated for sharing their time and talents.

God cultivates our lives in His love so that they will bloom with many gifts to share with others. But we have to welcome these gifts and admire their contribution to our common environment. Not everything is a competition against each other. Among God’s people, we are all on the same team working for the building of the Kingdom in our midst. We may be different varieties of blossoms, but placed correctly in a positive environment, we can all add to the beau

Baxter can’t live with beautiful, living plants around him. They are simply part of the food chain for him. We can be better than that. We can appreciate and cultivate each other’s beautiful goodness, and use it to enhance our celebrations of God’s beauty and goodness in our midst. It’s how Easter happens for those with the eyes to see.