When things are coming up roses, you really should thank the gardener.
At the end of my front porch was a beautiful, blooming display of yellow roses. I knew who planted them and I appreciated my wife and I appreciated my wife’s wanting to add a little class to our house. She took the time one spring to prepare for future springs by putting up a trellis and planting roses.
I have not polled passersby, so I can’t actually say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that nobody drives by thinking that the roses are an amazing accident. It would be a strange mind that would conclude that roses naturally grew in that spot. An even odder bit of reasoning would be required to think that the trellis is a random arrangement of molecules that just happened to be in place for roses to grow up at the end of our porch. No, people intuitively know that somebody built the trellis, that somebody put it up, and that somebody planted the roses there.
The world is filled with incredibly beautiful things. We see them every day. More often, we pass them by without really seeing. The roses are obvious. Less so is the intricate coloring of the feathers on the ordinary chicken that mysteriously showed up in our back yard. Or the variety of birds that gather at our feeder, or the ever-shifting shapes of the clouds overhead on a gorgeous spring day.
And, it’s not just nature around us. Can anything compare to the beauty of a baby’s laugh? Or to that deep, warm cappuccino of feelings when you hold your newborn child in your arms? The passion of a young couple on their wedding day? The easy familiarity between a husband and wife happily married for 40 years? The loyalty of an old friend, tested and proven through the years?
Sometimes life stinks. But often it is sweetly scented by roses at the end of the porch. When everything is coming up roses, thank the Gardener. Before the splendor of the first sunrise, He planted seeds of beauty that we now enjoy.
Let’s all look around at what is good and “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name” (Psalm 100:4).
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