The Roses on the Hillside

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When Ray and I pulled up to Dollar General on Sunday night, I noticed these pretty roses on the hillside at the back of the parking lot the store shares with a small office strip.

I don’t know if these roses are wild ones or if the property was a family’s home long ago. Either way, I am confident that today God is their only gardener.

I see two lessons in that picture.

First, the scene makes me think of social media culture. While the photo above is not one someone would be excited to post, the one below might be okay.

Or the following photo that I cropped from the one above might be even better, especially with a pretty caption saying, “God is the gardener of these roses.” It’s not really a great photo though because it’s fuzzy.

This is why: I used my phone because I didn’t have my camera with me, and I didn’t want to get chiggers from the weeds between the cigarette butt strewn gravel and the roses on the pretty rocky hillside.

Another lesson from my moments in the Dollar General store parking lot is that even average scenes like a parking lot often—maybe always— have spots of beauty, such as your daughter’s beautiful brown eyes sparkling as she sits in the middle of her bed surrounded by a floor so messy you can hardly get in the door.

Often it’s wiser to comment on those beautiful eyes instead of the mountain of stuff on the floor.

May God help us to notice the roses beyond the weeds and cigarette butts and the beautiful eyes beyond the messy floor. May He help us to be present in our real messy lives with our real messy families and not be distracted by orchestrated snapshots cropped from the messy lives of other people.

But the Lord said to Samuel,
“Do not look at his appearance
or at the height of his stature,
because I have rejected him;
for God sees not as man sees,
for man looks at the outward appearance,
but the Lord looks at the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7

 

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