Hope

You can see my garden straight through our kitchen windows, which has been the cause of much pain and humiliation for me. Ugh, my garden. My square little garden! What happened to you?

It started out rather beautifully this past spring. I weeded it, mulched it, trimmed it, planted it, sprayed it and watered it. I got several lovely little flowers to put in it. I tried my best to especially trim and water and mulch the two rose bushes- one yellow and one red- in hopes for beautiful blooms in June.

June came and the blooms came. But before I could even so much as glance at those rose buds they were covered in Japanese beetles! Gross. I sprayed them. I sprayed them again and again. But the beetles didn’t leave and I didn’t get one rose out of the several buds.

UGH. Soon weeds came. More bugs came. Bunnies and groundhogs. My garden became hopeless and slowly I began to give up on it. Now it is a huge mess with millions of weeds, all of them taller than I.

So you see why looking out the kitchen window at my flower garden- ahem, weed garden- always pains me.

But this morning as I sat down to breakfast I saw a flash of red out there. What was that?

It couldn’t be. Could it? Of course not, its October, not June.

Then I saw a flash of yellow. What was going on out there?

A short time later I trooped out to see. To my utter shock, there, beneath the grass and weeds and mess, was a beautiful red rose! The most beautiful red rose I had ever seen! It was big and full. It was deliciously and sweetly fragrant. Not one bug was on it.

On the bush beside it I saw four little yellow roses! How beautiful they were! Beautiful little rosebuds, deep golden with crimson tinges.

I walked back from my flower garden with a triumphant vase full of roses. “This is bizarre!” I said. “I’ve mulched, watered, and weeded that garden. Now that I finally leave it alone, it gives me beautiful flowers!”

“That sounds like a Bright Lights story,” Elizabeth said.

“There has to be a message in that,” said Mom. “Don’t give up hope! Maybe that’s what God is saying here!”

God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Don’t give up hope!

“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God” (Psalm 43:5).

“For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it” (Romans 8:24-25).

~From Jenny