When you are eager in the tiny portion that is your garden, when you are tying strings to give the stalks of the sweet peas their balance so flowers may alight on them like wings of pastel butterflies; when you appraise with glowing face the lilies and carnations (scent is to charm and color to amaze), I think: she has not found the loveliest blossom.
There is a flower full of mystery between this wall and that, amid this green. I found it but to bear it back to secret. It is a flower God and I have seen, and I not till I looked at it with Him.
Hidden and unpredictable and shy, it was not given to be shared, not even with you, little lover of fragrance. (Oh, with you least of all!) Plucked from the soft soil of your unawareness, uprooted from my silence, it would die. I keep it then, God’s individual favor, the private bloom I scent my storerooms by.
Musical Selection(John Michael Talbot)
Consider the ravens
They do not sow and they do not reap
Yet God the Father provides for them
Yet upon the earth
These are among the smallest things
Consider how the lilies grow
They do not spin and they do not weave
But I tell you now not even Solomon
In all of his splendor was arrayed
Like any one of these
So seek ye first the kingdom of God
And the wealth of His righteousness
For wherever your treasure lies
There will you find your heart
Be not concerned for your life
Or your body
What to eat, what to wear
Or what you will do for tomorrow
Seek out instead His heavenly kingdom
And the rest upon the earth
In its own time will follow
So seek ye first the kingdom of God
And the wealth of His righteousness
For wherever your treasure lies
There will you find your heart
So seek ye first the kingdom of God
And the wealth of His righteousness
For wherever your treasure lies
There will you find your heart
Meditation
Hence, “the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise, because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence”.If “the universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely… there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face”.The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it? (LD 65)
Prayer
For flowers that bloom about our feet; For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet; For song of bird, and hum of bee; For all things fair we hear or see, Father in heaven, we thank Thee!
For blue of stream and blue of sky; For pleasant shade of branches high; For fragrant air and cooling breeze; For beauty of the blooming trees, Father in heaven, we thank Thee! -Ralph Waldo Emerson
