Beautiful Things

Daffodils have always been my favorite flower, even when I lived in a place that was fairly warm year round, but now I live in a place that can be pretty cold in the winter, causing almost everything to go dormant and leaving a dreary world around me.  The fact that the daffodil is so bright, fragrant, and cheery, coupled with the fact that it is one of the earliest flowers to come up in the spring, before the weather even fully warms, makes it that much better to me.

But isn’t it just like God to take something good and make it even better?  He did that by helping me recognize it for the symbol it is, a symbol of life coming out of seeming impossible circumstances.  Isn’t that the message of spring every year?  Just as bright, alive crocuses and daffodils push through the frozen death every year after their bulbs have been planted only once, so the Holy Spirit can do in our hearts once we have been one time planted in Him.

Another name for the daffodil is Narcissus, linked with the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was so obsessed with himself that he stared at his own reflection in a pool of water so long that he eventually died, and in his place sprang up the daffodil, forever bending its head by the waterside, as if forever gazing at itself.  God helped me realize last night that we don’t have to think of that daffodil springing up out of the barren ground as narcissistic, but as bowing its head in humility and thanks for what God has done.  God can redeem any image, even an ancient one!

He makes all things new.  I love Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things”:  “All this pain.  I wonder if I’ll ever find my way.  I wonder if my life could really change at all.  All this earth.  Could all that is lost ever be found?  Could a garden come up from this ground at all?  You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of the dust.  You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of us.  All around, hope is springing up from this old ground.  Out of chaos life is being found in You.  You make beautiful things, You make beautiful things out of the dust.  You make beautiful things.  You make beautiful things out of us… You make me new, You are making me new…”