Learn from the Roses

So I'm out doing my morning ritual; checking my garden for ripe tomatoes & checking my rose bushes for blooms to bring into the house...This is one of my FAVORITE things to do...I ABSOLUTELY love fresh roses. They smell fantastic and quite simply they put a smile on my face EVERY TIME!!! The yummy fragrance turns my thoughts toward my Heavenly Father and His wonderful creation, and my mind cannot fathom; it cannot FULLY comprehend His Greatness, His Love, or His Grace...He is TRULY amazing and words cannot describe him!!!!!! Awwwwww! Okay, now for my lesson from the roses...as you know, roses have thorns, so I wear protective gloves to protect me from getting pricked by the thorns. But today, one of the roses had HUGE thorns and one "got me"...it poked through the thick rubbery part of my gloves and made my thumb start to bleed! OUCHY! As I regain consciousness...hee hee...not really, but as I recovered from the initial shock of the prickly pain, I thought, "No matter what you do to protect yourself from pain or hurt, pain or hurt still happens. It's just part of the wonderful thing we call life. So suck it up! Lean on God and the help of His Holy Spirit to pull you through the pain/hurt, learn something positive from it and move on. If you run or hide from the hurt/pain, you will cut yourself off from the Magnificent beauty of the rose (life)!"

Life happens! We don't have control over what or how it happens. We do have control of the choices we make and HOW we REACT to the pains and hurts that come our way. We can try to protect ourselves...and we all have a bajillion ways of "trying" to protect ourselves (i.e. hangin' out with certain people, not hangin' out with people, shopping, eating, talking, sleeping, hiding, reading, escaping, you know what your protection plan of action is...). Sometimes in order to protect ourselves, we try to build high protective walls around us only to find that we've blocked out everyone INCLUDING God, and even with the high wall of protection around our hearts, the hurt and pain of loneliness and rejection scale the wall and invade our "protected" place.

When I finished cutting all the roses I wanted, I brought them inside to prepare them for the vase. I pulled off the extra leaves that would be in the way, and I broke off the thorns, so they would fit nicely in the vase. In order to break the thorns off I placed my thumb on the side of the thorn and gently pushed and presto they fell off! We can learn from the roses that life has it's thorns and sometimes they are big, hurtful, and scary, but we can do all things through Christ Who strengthens us (Philippians 4:13). We don't have to run away and hide from life and let hurts/pains rob us of the incomprehensible, unfathomable, fragrant, beauty of abundant life in Christ.

Take time to smell the roses!!

In Him,
Jana