stolen flowers
...a true story and meditation
I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve been stealing flowers and praying I’m not caught.
There’s a great big bush of hydrangea out behind my home chapel that gets a late start at blooming and in the last several weeks it’s been positively filled with blossoms – well into the hundreds of them, I’d say. And as I walk through the path on one of my daily strolls around the neighborhood, sometimes I’ll take a branch or two and bring them home, put them in a jar filled with water, and admire them in my apple green kitchen.
Not a single soul is counting the blooms or would miss one or two if they were gone, but to this cradle Catholic, it does feels like stealing, like shame, and so I hold the branches low on the walk home so that no one will notice. I have done this maybe three times in the last month, just walking down the street with two or three low hydrangea flowers, thinking of what I’d say if someone asked where they came from. And it stumped me, until I realized that the perfect answer was not only true but also revealed quite a bit about God and this church of ours and how we operate, and how we could shift for the better.
Because if someone were to ask where I’d gotten those hydrangea blooms, I would say it truly:
“I got them from my Friend’s house.”
This Friend who wants my flourishing and my enjoyment and my abundance also wants me to have a piece of all of the good stuff that is freely growing at His house through grace: Him living in bread I can eat, His word teaching me how to live, music and art that help me pray, Him living uniquely in some of the good people He has made.
And of course, the flowers are no exception. He wants me to have it all.
He wants this good stuff to light me up and light up my space, too, because He loves me and knows how these good things He has made fill me with joy. And He’d love it if I took even more blooms and shared them with people who have never been to His house and if I told those people all about my Friend and how welcome they are to get to know Him and His goodness.
But I haven’t been doing that, because sometimes it just doesn’t seem like the people in the house are all that interested in sharing what we have with the people who are outside. And even though that’s a wrong idea and not at all reflective of how the Owner of the house operates, I have caught the mindset still, have understood it in my bones, and so I’ve settled for guiltily acquiring my scarce two blooms without considering that the whole point of the house is to share a good thing.
The whole point of the house is to share a good thing.
What would happen if we opened wide the doors and the windows to the house that was never ours to begin with? What if we offered bread and wine and water and oil and music and art and community and grace and flowers, too, these things that were freely given to us, out to the people who live in the neighborhood – people who have never been inside the house or who haven’t been there in a long while? What if these good things that were never ours to begin with passed through our hands at no cost to our neighbor as a sign that they were just as Beloved as we are?
What might we learn about the Owner of the house then? And how might His house grow?
