Consider the Lilies

My husband joined us and we knelt together. I cried. They laughed. My husband held us all.

I know this isn’t the same thing as the resurrection of our Lord Jesus, but looking at the beautiful Easter lilies at the stores this week made me remember how I felt when the daisies began to bloom again.

The flower that I thought was dead bloomed, giving me hope. Nature has a way of connecting man and God.

The lily represents Easter and Christ’s Resurrection—new birth, new life. The delicate, white blooms can be viewed as pure, innocent, and untainted by the world.

In Children’s Church, teachers sometimes explain the resurrection story illustrated using an Easter lily bulb. The bulb that is buried in the ground represents Christ’s tomb. However, the trumpet-shaped fragrant flowers also announce life after death.

By Deana Landers www.morningcoffeebeans.com

Our daughter, Carol, died on July 3, 1980. She was 19 months old. It was devastating for us.

We adorned her small casket with beautiful, white daisies. Our family and friends filled the church with arrangements and even more daisies.

When we were married, we decorated the church with daisies, my favorite flower. Our niece and nephew threw daisy petals down the aisles before I walked to unite with my husband. The flower is beautiful yet stunningly simple, and I have always admired it.

Everyone that knew us well knew about the daisies. I remember picking wild daisies with my children and being fascinated by how pretty the flowers were clutched in their little fingers.

After the funeral, our three older children helped me plant all the daisies around the side of our house near their playset. I told them this would be Carol’s garden and that the blooming flowers would remind us that she was alive in heaven.

Each day I would come home from work and go and look at the daisies, but they didn’t seem to be rooting and growing the way I thought they should. Sometimes I would whisper to God how important it was to me for the daisies to grow. It would symbolize her new home in heaven in my heart.

Three months came and went. The flowers seemed to have died. By the fall, I had stopped kneeling on the ground to look for new growth. Our road was very shaded, and fall became cold and dark.

I came home weary and downhearted from work one day. But when I got out of the car, our three children came running to me.

“Mom, Mom, come look!”

I was tired but reluctantly followed them around the side of the house. “Oh, my heart!”

All the plants had beautiful white buds that looked excited and ready to bloom. Some had filled out into a beautiful, radiant daisy with a bright yellow centerpiece and white petals.

Jesus even references the flower in Luke 12:27, stating, “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; yet I say unto you, Solomon was not arrayed like one of these.”

When Mary was standing at the empty tomb and feeling like her heart would sink into the ground with grief, the words she heard were life to her heart and soul.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.”

We weren’t there when they crucified Jesus. We weren’t there when they laid Him in the tomb. We weren’t there when the angels rolled the stone away, and we didn’t hear the angels say, “He is not here. He has risen.

I can’t even imagine how it all felt. But I think God has created an amazing earth for us and left us a loving letter in the Bible that reminds us daily that He is alive.

When nature ministers to my heart in the smallest of ways, I feel the presence of God. I feel hope.