My job ends the last of this month. Perhaps the thing I will miss the most is also the thing I used to dread the most—those 2 hour (one way) trips to Reserve each week (and sometimes several times a week). I disliked with a passion those trips, and yet it is while driving on those trips that I get the best inspiration from the Lord. I will miss those opportunities for inspiration.
On the last trip of the month, it was particularly enjoyable, and not because I knew it was the last one I would make for a while, but because the early rains this year caused a multitude and variety of wildflowers to line the roadway. What a joy those deep purples and oranges, pinks and reds brought to my soul dotting an otherwise brown landscape. The flowers certainly made the trip more bearable.
Then it dawned on me that we are a lot like those flowers. Would our marvelous Creator of the Universe highlight the roads with color and wonder, and not do the same with our paths of relationships in our lives? I remember having a poster in college that said, “Bloom Where You are Planted”, with a picture of a small white flower growing in the crack of a sidewalk. That is really what our God wants His children to do- bloom where He has planted us.
We may not know why we are “planted” in Datil, or Chicago, or San Antonio, etc., but the reality of life with the Lord is that we don’t necessarily need to know why we are planted where we are. We can trust our Lord that HE knows. We just need to bloom. We are here in this life not only to bring glory and pleasure to our Creator, but also to bring joy, color and fragrance into the lives of those who are traveling our same life path- just like the wildflowers along highway 12. The Lord plants, if you will, us into the paths of other people for a purpose. Sometimes we are to bring joy and color to others’ lives. Sometimes they add much needed color to ours, and sometimes we grow alongside a contrasting or complimentary color, so that when the world looks at us together, it cannot help but praise the God who made it so.
Some wildflowers grow right up close to the highway, and others are off in the distance a bit. One recent morning it looked, from the road, that one nearby rancher’s pasture was covered with a light snow. It being June, however, I was quick to realize that a certain white wildflower (sounds much better than weed) that grows close to the ground was in grand bloom throughout the field and indeed made the pasture appear to be covered with a light early morning snow. We too may be comfortable right up where the action of the highway is, or we may be content to be in the background of the Lord’s work. Either way, we are not invisible or unnoticed. Our planting is part of the Lord’s grand plan and we can be confident that as we bloom where He has planted us, we become part of the Creator’s bouquet, fulfilling our purpose in our life and the lives of others, and becoming a sweet aroma to the Lord and each other.