Flowers on a Stick

Always I have thought of flowers on a stick as artificial, often made of silk. Real flowers come on stems with leaves. Orchids have taught me yet again that things are not always what they seem on the outside.

Two years ago the first orchid entered our home as a gift. Beautiful, vibrantly coloured, luxurious are the adjectives I used for these real flowers on a stick. They bloomed for ten weeks before the amazing flowers fell off leaving dead sticks with three large green leaves at soil level along with grey roots reaching eerily up out of the pot. Ignored that orchid sat on the top of my china cabinet behind the angels. I kept watering the sticks hoping that someday it might bloom again.

Last year on my birthday, I received my second orchid. This time two sticks dressed in a delicate pink. These flowers bloomed for nine weeks. The petals fell again leaving the bare sticks behind. “Should I just throw both pots out?” I asked my daughter-in-law. She suggested repotting.  Nothing happened. One day I had water with cactus fertilizer leftover in my watering can. I walked by the sticks. Why not? Could it do any harm? They’re both just leaves and sticks.

Within a month, I saw buds beginning to form on the sticks. Another month and more water and the buds began to swell. This year, for my birthday once again I have beautiful flowers. All three sticks are blooming. You saw their picture above.

Jesus told the story of the gardener who requested a second chance for the olive tree. He was telling us clearly, with God there is always a second, third, as many as needed chances for us to bloom. Too often we see only dried up sticks. The beggar on the street corner with his cardboard sign, “Homeless hungry need work” or the person serving us covered in tattoos and punctured with rings in his nose or sometimes our own or another’s teenager determined to ignore our values – they are dead sticks needing to be tossed out. Sometimes it’s not this extreme. Sometimes it’s just people who are plainly different from us in religion, race, gender identification economic class that we think are ready for the garbage heap . Sometimes we make that judgment on ourselves. After all we fail to live up to our own expectations too. It’s so easy to judge a person worthless.

Orchids offer me a lesson we all know and too often forget, maybe because of fear, frustration, or failure. When I sign my children’s books I write, “Always remember you are God’s precious child.” Jesus taught us that God does not give up on any one of us. God keeps trying a little care, a little love.

Jesus suggests: Risk some experimental fertilizer, just one more dose of love. It takes a lot of patience and God’s help to give us the surprise of new life. God’s beauty is beyond anything we could have imagined was buried in that human being. Remember the question, “Can these sticks rise again?” and more importantly the answer, YES, with God’s help. For that I am truly grateful.