EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH
Change can help us bloom
By H.M. Wyeth
The poor potted plant looked terrible. Shriveled leaves and droopy stalks indicated that it was not well. However, once I moved it from its pot to the ground, where it had room to grow, it perked up. Over the next few weeks I watched it double in size.
From my vantage point I knew that the plant, which had appeared sickly and sad, was thriving in a far more congenial place. Yet I could not help thinking that to the the other plants in the cluster of pots where it languished, the sudden disappearance of their neighbor might seem catastrophic. All at once it had vanished, leaving only an empty container.
This occurred about the same time that a friend who had been sick for some time passed away. The parallel was quite clear: She, like the plant, was freed of her confinement and transplanted to a more suitable part of the garden.
Reasoning further along this line, I realized that although the pot had seemed to define the plant, they had nothing in common. Fired clay or plastic merely outlined a space that temporarily held the leaves, roots and flowers. Did the pot's color dictate the flowers? Did the pot's shape limit the leaves? No.
My friend's bodily condition could no more affect her identity than a pot could define the plant. It was comforting to think that, far from being extinguished, she had been moved to a better spot in God's infinite garden.
This idea applied to more than people who pass away. We often confuse the pots we now inhabit — be they bodies, neighborhoods, jobs or habits of thought — with our identity. Sometimes we need to be uprooted and moved to more nourishing ground. It does not mean we have to die, however.
The Bible is full of stories about people who get wrenched from their pots. Genesis, Chapter 12, tells how Abraham had to be transplanted from his family and home in Haran so that he could fulfill his destiny. It could hardly have been easy for someone who had spent 75 years in the same community to suddenly pack up and set off for an unknown destination. Yet how he bloomed in his new soil. Not only did he acquire vast wealth, he also gained the honor of being called the ancestor of three of the modern world's great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Going about his father's business, Jesus often found himself doing a bit of transplanting. In four pithy verses of his Gospel, Matthew tells how Jesus passed some fishermen at work and beckoned four of them to follow him (Matt. 4:19-22). Like Abraham, they dropped everything and obeyed. Freed from their old containers, they, too, flourished. Today we know them as the Apostles Peter, Andrew, John and James.
We often misunderstand and resist the divine gardener who wrenches us out of our comfortable but limited ways of life and thought. Yet our real nature is not the container; our nature is to grow and bloom. We all have it in us to leave our pots and become a larger part of God's garden.
H.M. Wyeth is a member of Christian Science Society, Kaua'i.
