WHATEVER

Five-Minute Friday

The word: Bloom

I hate the saying "bloom where you are planted."

I can make myself bloom about as much as I can go out in my yard and say bloom to a bush and have flowers appear.

It would be great if flowers appeared by saying bloom but gardening doesn't work that way. And life and success and fruitfulness doesn't happen because I tell myself to bloom where I've been planted.

Trust me. I've tried. And I'm sure you have too.

Funny how we forget the science lesson that teaches that the seed must break and die for life to come from it.

And so it is with us.

I remember a time when I raised my eyes towards the heavens and said, "whatever."

Not the snarky and sassy whatever I had disciplined my boys for saying to me when they were younger.

But the whatever that says I am broken and willing to die to my ways and to my dreams. I had said whatever to the God in heaven, confessing that I did not know what would ultimately, and eternally, would be good for me and for the ones I loved.

But I trusted that He did.

That whatever was the breaking, and the dying, that it took for me to bloom where I had been planted.

And that surrendering of my hopes and dreams, and my ways, spoken in the word whatever, continues to be the fertilizer that gives me life.

I can't believe there are still many days when I tell myself to bloom and I think that I will.

But when I become sick of the ugly and selfish fruit I bear, by trying to make myself bloom, I turn once again to the God in heaven and say "whatever."

And in that surrender, in that whatever, the most beautiful bloom I bear is peace.


"Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the LORD. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity when it comes. They dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.
But blessed be the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in Him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." Jeremiah 17: 5-8