In Bloom

Our first year at the pond, I asked my husband to plant sunflowers in the empty field. Sunflowers are our daughter’s favorite flower, so much so that for her wedding, the florist had them specially grown to enable her to have her favorite flower on her biggest day. My husband and our nephew worked the field over and the sowed the sunflowers. At the time they should have come up and bloomed, there was nothing! I was extremely disappointed.

A few weeks later as I drove down the driveway and around to the pond, I saw a most amazing sight! There, by the pond, where the ground was terribly dry and hard, was one tall, sunshine yellow sunflower! My husband explained that most likely the seed was dropped by a passing bird….I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. There, where by all rights, it shouldn’t be growing, it was doing just that and thriving!

God has placed each of us as His children where we are to serve Him. In I Corinthians chapter 12 beginning in verse 27, Paul is teaching that we Christians corporately make up the body of Christ, but individually we each have our own part to play. Looking at verse 28 we see, “And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.” Not everyone can be an apostle, or any of the other offices mentioned. Everyone is different and we all have different gifts and talents.

We can see a great example of being rightly placed by God in the book of Esther. Esther was a Jewish girl that God stationed in the palace of a king. He then used her to preserve the Israelites. If we could look in on that place today, we would probably view Esther as a nobody, just a girl. But God has a way of using nobodies! I trust your curiosity has the best of you, and I would direct you to read the account of Esther to get the whole picture.

Esther was truly a picture of “blooming where you are planted”, as we see here in Esther 4:14. In a conversation between Mordecai and Esther we see, “and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

Each of us is here for such a time as this. Will you ask God to help you bloom wherever you are planted?

(The Pond -2016)