Everyday Learning:
Simple Pleasures
When Mother and I talk each night, she likes to hear about my day. Once I told her about the walk our daughter Mary Evelyn, granddaughter Clara, and I made to take pictures among the wildflowers.
I love it when something like this prompts a childhood memory and Mother tells me a story. She began, “I like wildflowers in the spring.” Then, she told me about Sunday afternoons when she was seven years old. When a near-neighbor’s granddaughter visited her grandparents, she and Mother would walk by the creek and see the wildflowers. I loved imagining my mother walking among the wildflowers back in 1939.
Simple pleasures were the only ones available to Mother. She was the richer for it. With all of our distractions and busyness, sometimes it’s hard to remember to share simple pleasures with our children. Today might be just the day to put down the books and electronics and take a walk to look at the wildflowers. Once I discovered forty different kinds on a walk not more than a mile long. Forty different kinds. God’s imagination is limitless. Looking at wildflowers is just one way to help our children get an idea of just how wonderful God is.
When I was a little girl, one of the simple pleasures I enjoyed was singing hymns at church. I loved when the male and female voices took turns in “Consider the Lilies,” set to four-part harmony by E. H. Packard. As you walk along and look at the wildflowers, remember to:
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Matthew 6:28-29