Blooming?

I wrote this blog with my teenage girls in mind. This is for you - all of my beautiful, blooming, girls - budding with life!

I have a fetish desire to touch and smell unfamiliar flowers! I was the child who always came in with a yellow tipped nose from flower pollen (and shhhh…. I still do!). I recently came back from a road trip where I was in 10 different states near the west coast. I saw, took pictures of (and stuck my nose in!) hundreds of different flowers in the desert and mountain plains. As I observed the unique flowers in the various climates, I noticed they had one thing in common – they all blossomed in the harshest of conditions. There were no sculpted, fertilized or raised flowerbeds out there. These flowers bloomed and grew from the parched, hard and cracked desert ground or from the fierce windblown mountainside cliffs.

As I observed this the Lord starting showing me that our lives are like these flowers. Regardless of what got us to the rough places we walk through in this life (be it personal or stupid choices, a calling, or something that happened to us beyond our control) we all go through the rough places.

What do you do in the rough place? Do you lie dormant hoping for the gentle rain to come along and change your circumstances of hard ground? Do you give up and give in to sin, bitterness, frustration, anger, pity, and perfectionism? And by doing so die in the cracked, unforgiving ground? Or do you blossom and bloom anyway? Despite the circumstance of your life do you allow the Lord to use those hard winds to prune you till your blooming with all the brilliance He designed and created you to? Maybe you’ve bloomed and tried to allow the Lord to mold and use you in these times but you’re getting dusty, the wind has tarnished and dulled your blossoms to a dull shadow of what you used to be. You blend in with the hard backdrop rather than brilliantly shining with your glorious hue of colors.

Where are you at today? Where do you need to be and what do you need to do to get there?

The Lord does not call into account our circumstances – He judges on how we react to them. Time is precious, we can’t waste it dying or being dormant, waiting for things to change. The Lord has only given us today to bloom for Him. Are you reflecting His glory in your life?