Garden Lullaby, November 2, 2018
I saw this tiny marigold bloom and thought, “the beginning of something beautiful.” But I was wrong. I’m always wrong.
These marigolds are in the MIDDLE of something beautiful. There was beauty in the roots and beauty in the blooms. There was beauty when they died and beauty when they held tight to life. There was beauty in the fullness and beauty in the spindly, determined stems. There was beauty in a dozen, and beauty now in a tiny, brave marigold basking in the sun. This marigold bush has always been in the midst of beauty…different kinds, all sorts. Never asking to be seen, but living the middle again, again, again.
I’m in the middle too. And here is beautiful, changing life again, again, again.
One thing I would say differently now is I don’t believe death has to be beautiful.
It was beautiful that these marigolds completed a full life. Beautiful they bloomed and lived. I could celebrate that. But death is loss and not the way it’s supposed to be. Now, I know this is a flower, so in no way are we talking souls here, but I think maybe I had still been in a place of trying to reconcile and shape pain into a good thing. Maybe not. I can’t remember exact thoughts from November 2018!
But I do know I don’t have to make death and loss and pain into something good. God didn’t create it to be this way. He transforms, heals, brings life into brokenness, out of brokeness, alongside brokenness, but I don’t think the death part is the good part.
The pressure isn’t on you or me to make things good and okay and beautiful again. We can trust God and ask Him for comfort as we experience so many forms of death in this broken world. And simultaneously we can celebrate the life present like spindly, determined marigold stems or getting out of bed with songs of hope in our heart though life is feeling ragged, but for the rest that is much too hard to bear, we don’t have to make it beautiful.
We can simply fall into the comfort of our friend Jesus and trust in our sovereign, loving, kind, and just God who thinks of us and knows us and knows so much more than us.
Sierra V. Fedorko 