The Bouquet

"Wild Colors" by Paul Gilbert

Call it cliche and cheesy.  I’ll make the ultimate girl confession and admit it.  I like flowers.  I enjoy hiking through a field of them, I enjoy planting them, I enjoy photographing them, I enjoy giving them away as presents, I enjoy walking by them in grocery stores, and I enjoy receiving them.  I even enjoy watering them (that’s true love).

And, I don’t just enjoy flowers, I love bouquets of flowers.  I remember summers growing up in the mountains when the wildflower season was in full glory.  I would run around our property excitedly pulling every flower I could find and smashing them into an overflowing cup.  The bigger, the better.  Once I had two cups full, I would race into the house and put one cup on my mom’s night stand, and one cup on my dad’s night stand, then wait with an impish grin for my parents to discover their awaiting treasures.  “Treasures” may be an exaggeration.  But, my parent’s love overlooked the sad flower-barren yard outside that had been exchanged for the limp stems in plastic cups harboring hitch-hiking insects that now crawled all over their night stands.  In kid language, I said, “I love you”, because I had given them the best treasures I knew how to give.

Gifts and treasures have always been important to me.  I recognize that everyone has a different language of love, but gifts are a pretty good way to go...just sayin’.  Didn’t God’s ultimate act of love for us come in the form of a gift, His very Son?  And how about the gifts that the magi brought to Jesus after His birth, or the gift of the expensive perfume that Mary poured on the feet of Jesus?  Biblical, I think so.  

For some reason, even being the gift-giver that I am, I keep forgetting that I can give gifts back to God too.  But, in God’s language, these gifts to Him are packaged in a top secret pseudonym called “surrender”.  And, surrender often looks like a bouquet of flowers, which is exactly where I found myself recently.

Actually, surrender found me kneeling before my Lord in a deserted field.  My tears splashed on the dirt clinched in my hands, for I knew what I needed to give up, but the giving part was so daunting.  Would He please teach me how to surrender?  I looked up, and realized that I was in a high alpine meadow, surrounded by hundreds of glowing wildflowers...secret treasures that I had planted and been carefully tending to.  I brushed away my tears and began gently plucking the tender blooms that I had watched grow.  Such glory only belongs in the hands of Him who created them.  I gathered an armful of yellow clusters of fear, purple petals of unfulfilled hope, pink sprays of flittering heartbeats, red shoots of rejection, and blue buds of insecurities.  It was a stunning bouquet that looked way better in my Lord’s hands, than in my alpine meadow.

Surrender sometimes looks like a bouquet of flowers, carefully planted, delicately cared for, gently plucked away from its roots, and lovingly given away.  Sometimes, I think God lets us plant our flower treasures, just so we can have the joy of giving it back to Him, tied in a ribbon of surrender.  The hands of my Father will always be the best place for my flowers.