Category: Flowers

Restore, Confirm, Strengthen and Establish

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography8 Comments

 

IMG_2656 may tree sky he restores my soul green

The year I started writing this blog our valley was hit by an explosive wind storm. Many homes were damaged and thousands of trees fell. (I wrote about it here.) I grieved for my beautiful shade tree, one of the victims. We carted the big old May tree away in pieces to a place where a wood chipper re-purposed it as mulch. I hated the gap left, but the back garden has improved with the increased sunlight. The roots were too hard to remove, so I left two shoots to grow and kept hacking away at the others that sprang up.  Yesterday I was doing a spring clean up in the yard when I saw the first blooms on the two shoots that have become young trees. Today most of the rest of them opened.

 

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In all the years the big tree stood there it never blossomed before May 1. At this altitude and latitude it was often closer to June 1 than May 1 when the sweet-smelling flowers appeared. Because the root system established by the old tree was so deep and wide these two new trees springing up from it are growing faster than I could have imagined. They are filling in the gap and are taller than the house now. Hundreds of flowers cover them.

As I watched them sway in the golden sun of evening the word that came to mind was “restore.”

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. 

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 

Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

(1 Peter 5:6-10 ESV)

The Lord is faithful. He himself has restored. Now I have two May trees – and they are blooming sooner than expected. The first signs of promise of the restoration of many things. I wait and watch with anticipation.

 

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Well, we made it through another winter, Ma.

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography7 Comments

IMG_2302 crocus backlight

 

I’m unduly fond of the little crocus flower with its white fuzz showing up like the tiny hairs on Grandma’s chin in the sun. When I was a child I brought Grandma a fistful of prairie crocus blooms as soon as they poked through last season’s dead leaves of grass. Grandpa would say, “Well, we made it through another winter, Ma. There’s your proof.”

We made it through.

Thank you, Lord.

Thank you.

Unfolding

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers3 Comments

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So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. (2 Corinthians 4:16 The Message)

Look Who’s Here!

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography, Water5 Comments

 

Blooming by my front door this morning.

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Melting ice down at the creek yesterday.

 

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The same gentle warm sun that streams through my window has been gently coaxing changes in the neighbourhood. Gentle awakenings. Yes.

I’ve noticed that gentleness is on the list of the fruit of the Spirit and brutal candor is not. Why is that, I wonder. What’s with this frying pan to the face school of prophecy? If Holy Spirit takes the time to melt our hearts with patience and kindness and speaks truth to us in a gentle way that melts away lies we have believed and replaces them with courage to take the risk of blooming, shouldn’t we do the same for each other? Gentleness is not weakness; it is patient power under control.

I read this quote by Stephen Crosby the other day. “If people are going to reject the gospel we carry, let them reject it because they are rejecting a love they cannot process or handle at the moment, not because of an idiot with a Bible and the interpersonal skills of Attila the Hun.”

Yes, there are times, when for the sake of protecting the vulnerable we need to be more blunt and even aggressive, and there are folks for whom subtlety is a faintly detected jet trail flying miles overhead. Jesus spoke gently in powerful parables, but sometimes he confronted religious pseudo-experts directly and plainly, but only when they blocked the path for everyone else. Allowances need to be made, but if smacking people upside the head with words – however true – becomes your go-to means of communication (because you “don’t have time to say this nicely”) and fact-delivery continually trumps loving encouragement, don’t be surprised when your garden of friends in May looks more like a frozen creek in January.

Just sayin’.

(File under: Things I have learned the hard way.)

Beauty and the Trash Can

On By Charis PsalloIn Art, Flowers6 Comments

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What is beauty? How do little children know what beauty is and why do they respond to it? Why do we create it and spend time and money looking for beauty and surrounding ourselves with it?

My little three-year old granddaughter sat on my lap as we checked out ballet dancing clips on YouTube. She has moved to music since she gained control of her tiny arms and legs. As soon as one video started she exclaimed, “Dass so boodeefo! So boodeefo!” She recognized the music. “Oh! Dass Cara and the Nutcacker! Dass so boodeefo! Again! Again!” She only got down off my lap so she could dance to the music herself. She is so boodeefo.

I took a shortcut around the back of the hotel while I was out for a walk on our recent trip to California. Near the garbage/trash/rubbish bins I saw a magnolia tree in bloom.  They don’t grow here in the Canadian Rockies and I was amazed to see such beauty hiding in such an undignified location. Like my little granddaughter’s dancing it’s blooming was not an effort to seduce me into giving it something, or serving it. It just was, and I could see the generosity of my Creator’s hand -as well as the hand of whoever planted it there.

A friend of mine, a classical pianist with a beautiful heart, left his comfortable home and career and went to Cambodia to help people recover from the horrors they had experienced during the Pol Pot regime. He asked what they needed most and was surprised when they answered, “Music!” Once their immediate needs for food and shelter had been taken care of the thing they desired most was the beauty of music. He was just the man for the job.

One of the qualities of Christ is his beauty. For most of us it’s not seen with physical eyes, not usually, unless you count his reflection in the  beauty of nature. Those who have come to know him in experience rather than theory are enthralled by his beauty, the beauty they see with their spiritual eyes. The Psalmist wrote: I am pleading with the Eternal for this one thing, my soul’s desire: To live with Him all of my days— in the shadow of His temple, to behold His beauty and ponder His ways in the company of His people. (Psalm27:4 The Voice)

Somehow we recognize beauty and respond to it. Beauty is who we are meant to be and who we are meant to be with. There is within us a discontent with the ugliness of garbage. Our hearts long to be restored back to the garden. Beauty gives us hope.

A Foretaste

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, PhotographyLeave a comment

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“Watching and waiting,
looking above,
echoes of mercy,
whispers of love.”
(from Blessed Assurance by Fanny Crosby)

My husband said, “Let’s go!” So we went.

I wasn’t expecting it at all, but he said he could take a few days off and unseasonably warm weather on the left half of the continent made a road trip in February feasible. We looked at a map and determined the closest place with sandal-worthy temperatures was Northern California.

The first thing I saw when we got out of the car after two and a half days of driving was a tree in bloom.

A few days before we left I kept hearing and seeing the word “adapt” in a dream. Frankly, I started bracing myself for another challenge. What now, I thought. I realized instead, as I was looking for sandals and summer clothes to quickly toss in a suitcase, that “adapt” this time meant adapting to a pleasant surprise.

We’re home now, after a wonderful ten days in a different world with sun and palm trees and spring flowers. There is ice on the sidewalk here and work piles up again. It will be another three months before my plum tree is in bloom, but I feel like I had a foretaste of what is to come.

He does that, my Abba God. It’s a kind of now and not yet gift. He allows us to experience a taste of what He has planned, a remembrance of the future. And it gives us hope.

Hope is vision-led endurance.

Thank you, Lord.

Thank you.

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Enjoy

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers, Photography1 Comment

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Just these two words He spoke
changed my life,
“Enjoy Me.”

What a burden I thought I was to carry –
a crucifix, as did He.

Love once said to me, “I know a song,
would you like to hear it?”

And laughter came from every brick in the street
and from every pore
in the sky.

After a night of prayer, He
changed my life when
He sang,
“Enjoy Me.”

Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada ) (1515 to 1582)

A Rose In One Vast Howling Wilderness

On By Charis PsalloIn Black and white, Flowers, PhotographyLeave a comment

jerusalem rose white IMG_0711

You will never find Jesus so precious as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then he is like a rose blooming in the midst of the desolation, a rock rising above the storm.

– Robert Murray McCheyne