I was in a shop recently and found a postcard replica of a picture that used to
hang in my childhood home.
I would fix my eyes and mind on it as a child and would live in the world it
created. It spoke of an unseen reality.
So today when I walked down my wild, erratic garden after rain, a patch of
violets awoke my memories of that world.
The original plant of violet, like the picture, was from my childhood home
several decades and hundreds of kilometres away.
I held my breath in awe of my violet patch and gathered a handful to put in a
white, porcelain vase. They reminded me that the unseen was as real as the seen.
One day, at the beginning of the world, a violet dropped a seed that for a
thousand thousand generations afterwards dropped a seed. It came down through a
flood; through a garden where sweated drops of warm blood sprinkled the earth as
though to symbolically cleanse it; through a garbage tip in a garden where a man
was crucified and his blood symbolically sprinkled even the garbage; through
another garden where Mary, weeping, thought Jesus himself was the gardener.
And I found myself crying out, "Mary, Mary, he WAS the gardener. Without him
there was no violet because without him there was nothing made that was made.
His violet is in a vase on my desk."
I place the postcard beside my vase of violets. As I switch off the light the
unseen presence hovers in the room. The icon from the past joins yesterday with
today, together they fill tomorrow, and I am a child again.
‘Truly I tell you, unless you become like children,
you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ From Matthew 18:3
Elizabeth Price, Team writer with Just a Minute
reprice@dragnet.com.au
The Illustrator: This daily newsletter is dedicated to encouraging
everyone to look towards Jesus as the source of all the solutions to our
problems. It contains a daily inspirational story, a Bible verse and encouraging
messages. HTML and plain text versions available.
The Nugget: Published three times a week, this newsletter features inspirational devotionals and mini-sermons dedicated to drawing mankind closer to each other and to Christ.