Hi friends.
I recorded a song in a stairwell at my school. I think I was so sick and tired of hearing how people were talking to each other that I literally couldn’t help but go and worship. And the stairwell has a cool echo.
I didn’t bother re-recording or fixing mistakes. I sing a lot of the wrong notes and play a lot of the wrong chords. But I felt like I shouldn’t record it again to make it “perfect”. This song (Altars by Renee Schwab) is one of those songs that just makes me feel like I’m about to burst into tears or pass out or explode or something of that nature. Jesus really meets me in this song. When I’m singing it, I feel like I’m looking Him in the face.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about flowers and love and other things that are normally too full of feeling for me to talk about outwardly.
If a flower were to never bloom, but rather become a bud and die, would it still be beautiful? What about if it never even passed the seed stage? Or what if it did bloom, but was overshadowed by the flowers around it and wilted too quickly for anyone to notice that it had bloomed?
I think the thing (the truth, the revelation, the need) that’s been hitting me the hardest lately is love. (blah). Normally, I would resent a sentence like that, but when love has pounded you in your metaphorical chest and twisted your way of thinking completely, you want to talk about it.
I’m not sure how much of my life I’ve spent with the knowledge of what love is. If I have ever known, it hasn’t been a continual thing. I’ve gone through stages of thinking… love is what parents give you at “all times”, love is a best friend, love is the embrace of someone who makes you feel wanted and brings you joy, love is selflessness and sacrifice. But as sad as it is to admit, all of those types of love fall short. None of them are eternal, or even consistent at times.
Maybe my biggest problem up until now has been that I haven’t felt like I deserve love. I think it’s rare for any of us to think we deserve love. But I’m learning something important: when you think you are a certain way, you pretty much become that way. So by thinking that I’ve been unlovable, I’ve made it rather difficult for others to love me. And that reflects onto the way that I love others as well.
Now here’s this image of love:
A man has a seed that he knows will grow into something beautiful. He knows what type of flower it will bloom to be. Every shade and hue and scent- he knows exactly what it will be, and loves the image. So he spends every moment of every day nurturing this seed. He waits patiently for it to become what he knows it should be. Even though he knows this seed could fall off of its natural course, he devotes all of his time to watching it grow. And no matter what this flower becomes, he calls it beautiful. He knows it’s beautiful, because he sees a perfectly pure beauty that could only come from this flower that he watched grow.
How strange and wrong would it feel if the flower grew a sad little voice that only said to the man, “You can’t love me. I’m not lovable or beautiful, or anything you spend all of your time trying to prove to me I am.”
If you can forgive the stupid metaphor, I hope this speaks to you in some way.
I’m pretty much feeling like a flower right now.