I love this time of year when the trees bloom. The almond branches flower first, and then apricot, peaches, and cherry trees. Wild mustard fills the fields and daffodils rear their ruffled, yellow faces.
On my way to my friend’s house, I admire her yard filled with flowers. And I admire my friend. She’s an 86 year old pastor’s widow who has lived alone for fifteen years since her husband went to heaven. She once confessed to me her greatest fear was someone would break into her home when she was alone.
And one night this past winter it happened. She was in bed when her silent home alarm went off. In the garage, she found the intruder, a man in his fifties, probably a druggie. He’d pulled out one of her locked windows and climbed in. “Why are you here?” she asked him.
“At that moment I wasn’t afraid at all. Jesus filled me with peace,” my friend told me after it happened. She went on to feed and befriend the man, reheating her leftover supper for him, sharing God’s grace and the gospel as he ate with her. He told her how hard his life had been. His spouse had died too, and he was alone in the world. As a boy, he’d gone to church, but his adult life was a broken mess. How much he wanted God to help him. After sharing their stories, my friend sent him on his way with a to-go baggie of food and prayers.
“Ma’am,” he told her, “I can show you how to fix that window so a person can’t break into your home like I did.”
My friend replied, “God’s angels guard my home. And God’s angels brought you to me so we could talk about Jesus and I could feed you tonight.”
“I believe that, ma’am,” the man replied near tears. Then he walked out her door into the cold with food and my friend’s warm love filling him.
“Do you know I wasn’t afraid one bit,” my friend told me with shining eyes. “God brought that man to me to grow my faith. God showed me in my greatest fear there was no fear at all.”
How I admire my friend. She is so filled with the love of Christ. So certain God is her protection. She radiates peace and joy. A lovely flower in the garden of God.
Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me” John 21:22.
This is how Jesus responds when we compare ourselves to other believers. When we say, “Why can’t I be like him or her?”
My friend has been a Christian all her life. Raised in a Christian home by Christian parents. Our backgrounds are night and day. I’m the night, she’s the day. And she’s walked with Jesus about seventy years longer than I have. We certainly aren’t the same kind of flower.
It takes time to grow a Christian. Time for faith to flourish and fears to fall away under the patient hand of God. We must trust the seasons of our lives to Christ, plowing and planting, pruning and blooming. I will never be the flower my friend is, but I can trust God to grow in my life the faith I see at full bloom in hers.
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