She Blooms

She Blooms

Grief makes gray of everything, and lately it has leached most of the color from my world. But last week, the same awful week that placed a final mark of punctuation on my sadness, the lone rose bush in my backyard sprang to Technicolor life. And it hasn’t stopped blooming yet.

I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that bush was planted by one of the spinster sisters who once inhabited my home. It’s that old. (And bless them, so were they.) Last spring it yielded very few flowers, and most of those were spotted and misshapen. So in the fall I pruned it back. Way back. And then forgot.

Now it’s defied the shears, the mixed-up weather of this past winter, and my own sadness and is effortlessly yielding cutting after cutting for vase upon vase—each flower a bright-pink exclamation mark to interrupt the gray. Something inside the bush said, “Bloom!” And so it has.

I marvel at the God who flips a switch each spring and turns on color as abruptly as if I’d stepped into Oz. At how sleeping things awake and offer beauty in good time. I see him do this in my front yard and in back, along the interstate and down the block. And I want him to do it in me.

I want to awaken to the call to bloom and defy the gray of a heavy season. To burst with color and beauty and life—not in spite of everything, but in and through everything. To let go of secrets itching to shout themselves out. And to free each loveliness that clamors for an opening. I want to burst with color against all odds, declare my Maker, and so declare it spring. I want someone to say, “She blooms—summer, autumn, winter, spring.”

I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like the lily, and he will take root like the cedars of Lebanon. His shoots will sprout, and his beauty will be like the olive tree and his fragrance like the cedars of Lebanon.

Hosea 14:5-6, NASB