In His Time

The previous owner of our house made many questionable decisions, but he did have a stroke of genius when he planted a beautiful blue hydrangea bush right next to the front door.  When we bought the house in the dead of winter, we didn’t realize just what we had, but summer revealed it to be nearly four feet in diameter and covered in showy blooms.  Since I have the special talent of killing almost everything I plant, I was thrilled to have a mature hydrangea that provided me with cut flowers for most of the summer. 

Something happened, though, during the deep freeze of 2013-14, and that spring the bush struggled to put on blooms.  It still filled out, leafy and green, but I couldn’t cut enough flowers for a bouquet.  Adding insult to injury, the neighborhood deer aggressively mowed down the side of the bush near our front door, and James wondered aloud if it was a goner. 

I held my breath this spring.  Again, the leaves came in thick and full, and the side the deer left untouched began to produce blooms.  However, the branches that were decimated in the fall were slower to regrow, and I began to wonder if the bush would be lopsided forever and the blooms were few and far between.  It sounds silly to be so sad about a plant, but those showy blue blooms gave me so much joy every time I entered and left the house, and they brightened up even the messiest room.  To me, they represented how much God loves me: he not only gave us a home we could never afford, but He planted my favorite flowers right by the door.  Like a man pursuing the woman he loves, God had even considered my favorite color.  And then they were gone.  “He gives and takes away,” I reasoned as July rolled past and the plant remained mostly barren.  I cut a few blooms to dry indoors, and figured we were done. 

Right around the time I returned to work, my experiment in trust seemingly a failure, I noticed a tiny bud near the front door.  Just one, and I expected that would be it.  We rarely got showy blooms at the end of the summer in the past.  And yet, as I walked the garbage outside and checked the mail day after day, I noticed one new bloom after another.  Barring another deer attack, the showiest weeks of the summer are going to come when summer is almost gone. 

God likes to work that way, doesn’t he?  He waits until human achievement and reason and science can no longer take credit.  Then…pow.  Think of Hannah and Elizabeth, barren well into old age, when God enable them to conceive.  Only God.  Think of Lazarus.  John 11:14-15 tells us that Jesus was glad He didn’t get there before he died, for now you will really believe.  Our God loves us much that He aims to resurrect our hearts while He puts together the pieces of our lives.  The physical miracle is only a blurry picture of the spiritual one.  My hydrangea is blooming with promise that God is not done yet.  

Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time.  He has planted eternity in the human heart, but evens so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.  Ecclesiastes 3:11.