Watering Peace

Some days when I’m very busy, I don’t want to go outside and water my flowerbeds and pot plants. It takes too much time, I grumble to myself. But then, if I don’t, they will wilt and die, especially during the summer heat. So I make myself do it. Oh, okay. But I’m feeling stressed.

Then as I move around the yard, I see the flowers in bloom—the bright pink hibiscus, the geraniums, the mandevilla vines, the vinca and purslane. I can’t persuade the mandevilla vines to live through the winter, so I get new ones every summer. This year I have two of them; they have perfect dark wine-colored flowers with orange cupped centers. Only in nature would wine and orange go together well. They are magnificent works of art by God. I think about how God has put me in charge of seeing that they have water, and how they depend on me. Their beauty soothes me.

In the shade, I feel a breeze—not cool, but at least not unbearably hot. I hear birds in the trees around us, mostly beautiful white-wing doves that have been in our part of the Southwest for only a few years, moving up from Mexico. Their shape is graceful; they are white and the color of cream. Their soft cooing is not mournful to me, as many people say. To me, it speaks of a deep-seated peace.

By the time I am finished watering, my stress is gone, even though it took all that time, and I feel a satisfaction and peace that my spirit needed. My anxiety is gone. I think about what Jesus said in Matthew 6:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

. . . . See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. . . . But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Watering Peace

http://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2006/08/watering-peace.html