Making Long Lasting Friends – At Any Age
Thoughts about friends and other things
from Darla Noble
For as long as I can remember, I have been in awe of my grandpa’s ability to make things grow. No, it was more than that. He had the ability to combine plants God gave us to make new and different ones. Grapes, apples, and a few other things…Pa Pete grafted parts of two different varieties to make another. He never made a big deal out of it. He did it for fun. To challenge himself. But as much as I share his love for gardening, I never gave a thought to trying my hand at grafting. Until.
Two summers ago, I decided to give it a go. I decided to start small and with what I thought would be easy plants. I chose iris and cone flowers. I wanted to see if I could combine two iris or two coneflowers that would give me a new color variation. The iris didn’t bloom last year. That’s not too unusual for a first-year plant. The coneflowers bloomed, but not in the way I expected (hoped).
When I grafted the yellow and purple coneflowers together, I expected to get a flower that was blue-ish. What I got was a plant with multi-colored flowers. Some were yellow. Some were pink. Some were red. Some were purple. It wasn’t the look I was going for, but that didn’t mean it was any less grafted. Right? Right.
Now let’s fast-forward to a few days before the start of 2023, I jumped on the bandwagon of choosing a word for the year–a word to use as a springboard for being a better me. The word I chose was SHINE. I had intentions and aspirations of doing things for my family, church, neighborhood, and community to put smiles on faces and in hearts. But from day one of 2023 (literally), I’ve been doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I traveled over a hundred miles from home to care for a family member who is unable to care for herself after suffering a fall. And this is where I will be for…a while.
Just like my grafting adventure, my year hasn’t started out the way I expected. My plans to shine my light so that people can see and know Jesus better are a lot like all those holiday flights…cancelled/delayed. These days my light is more like a little birthday candle. But it’s still a light and it’s still shining. Right? Right.
Moment of truth: this hasn’t been and isn’t an easy lesson to learn. But it is a lesson I am sure will serve me well for the rest of my days, and it is a lesson I am sure will come with its share of blessings if I am the student God wants me to be.
The same is true for you, too. Things don’t always go the way we expect or want them to. But when we choose to see the good and when we remember that nothing compares to the joy that we have in Jesus, however he chooses to let it turn out (blue-ish flowers or not), it will be beautiful.
Be salt and light,
Darla
NOTE: If you haven’t read “Jesus and Zinnias Make Me Smile” or “Through the Eyes of a Shepherd”, I want to encourage you to do so. For the month of February, 20% of the sales of these books will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Category: Blog
