I didn’t need flowers – in fact I’d bought some the day before.
I wasn’t feeling sad, bad or particularly mad, in fact it had been a good day of small achievements, connecting with family and friends, a pleasant walk in the sunshine.
Then a friend phoned, “Do you need bread… cheese scones… flowers?” Well, not really, but never say “No”, especially to cheese scones. A bag of surplus soon-to-go-out-of-date food and a bunch of flowers was coming my way. All useful stuff.
But it was the flowers – a magnificent bunch of peonies, my favourite summer flower. Only one was fully out; a glorious head of tightly packed wine-red petals surrounded by a halo of flat ones. The rest were buds, full of promise for the days to come. And they did not fail, not one of them. Twenty pounds the label said, but to me a free gift from the hand of God; unasked for, unmerited, just a fun gift from a loving Father, who knows my preferences!
“Give thanks to the Lord” the writer of Psalm 100 encourages, “for the Lord is good and His love endures forever.” It’s so easy to forget to do that when the difficulties of life roll round and over us. It’s so easy to blame God when things go wrong – and there is a lot of stuff going wrong at the moment. There is a whole lot of heartache, of stress, of anger, of fear – all human emotions; all of them understandable. To be thankful seems quite foreign, possibly bizarre.
But then, how often do we stop and give thanks when life is easy, when things are going well? Looking closely at the peonies, I see the richness of colour, the incredible detail of each petal; each flower head unique from the next. That detail repeated year after year after year is mind-boggling. God does not change. His love, His faithfulness, His care, His authority, the rhythms He has put in place continue season after season. The rhythms of nature are costly.
They involve a dying back, a fading away, before new life can break out each Spring. Already, only a week later my peonies are dropping their petals. Yet even in this there is something beautiful about the pile of fallen petals gathering round the base of the vase. Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands for ever.” Our situations may change, may be hard and difficult, but God and His Word do not change. We can rely on Him. We can trust His Word. In each hard place, we need to look for the things to give thanks for, knowing that the hard times are for a season and will pass.
God knows each one of His children better than they know themselves. He knows the good times. He knows the difficult times. Another psalm describes how God created us, “you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb…Your eyes saw my unformed body all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (Psalm 139). There is nothing about us that God does not know, our fears, our anxieties, our joys, our character traits, our personal preferences. He knows each day exactly how we are.
There is so much in all of that to be thankful for – He knows, He cares, He loves. He knows when to send peonies. The least we can do is give thanks.
