The Lesson of the Tulip Bulb

It’s been good for me to garden. I am redoing the courtyard. Today’s lesson from the garden was thought provoking. I know I told you that Patty had planted tulips. Big beautiful purple tulips. There was no other color in the garden but those. She had left a big purple ribbon on them, tied, and the whole scene was lovely. Today and for quite a while now, I noticed that the tulips were long gone. The purple ribbon laying in the ground covered up by dirt. In their place stood white stringy dried up stalks. They didn’t really stand, they were laying all over the ground. Like Hans. Toward the end, he couldn’t stand up either. His vitality was reduced to a long body on a bed of white sheets. No longer to stand erect as God has made man to be. Lev 26: 13. (Man does not crawl on his belly unless he has totally given in to the snake in the garden.) I was sad when I saw these flowers. God, I prayed. Does everything have to die? “Yes. No. Look below.” I pulled up the bulbs, invisible and not seen. Roots were all over the place and strange white thick stalks were beginning to emerge from the root itself. Like Hans, laying up in the valley on a bluff overlooking El Paso. Laying below the surface but not dead.  I know that Hans is not the root, but merely a branch, who lays waiting for his body to be raised. I get the picture now. Jesus has gone ahead to prepare the place, the soil for his new existence. And he waits for me and for all of us. 

I think to myself more often than I care to admit,  “Where are you God? We used to be such friends. And now, when I think I need you the most you are clearly silent.” Not seeing or hearing the voice of God, I see that I am so dependent on these tangible visible signs to my senses. I am still such a child in the faith. Needing those immature and feeble assurances. But God bypasses those. He speaks directly to my Spirit. And He was teaching me this lesson of the tulip bulb through my eyes, and even through my disappointment. 

But even more, I realize He has given me the energy to work all morning in the hot sun, lifting and bending. He was the "wind beneath my wind" (pardon the terrible metaphor). I plant eight big red plants in the garden, having to dig holes to match. "So, You are the One doing this gardening. You also helped Hans with the garden too." 

I got on my knees without my pillow at one point and immediately touched the solid concrete walkway. I remembered Hans’ knees— dark brown from the years of bending down and pulling out dead things in his garden. I quickly got the pillow, for I am vain enough not to want the "gardeners knee". But Hans didn’t care about such things. He made things beautiful for us. And now I do it for him and for my visitors too. Everyone must see that God is for life, not death and inherent in the plant is the sign of life everlasting.