I was visiting a homebound member of my church this past week and we got into talking about death and dying. She is a woman of devout faith, but she's reached a point in her battle with cancer where she's not really sure why God is making her hang on. As we were talking, I happened to notice the poinsettia in her living room.
The date is April 7 and there is still a poinsettia sitting in her living room.
Now, mind you, this poinsettia is not looking even the least bit droopy. I looked at it for a moment, surprised that not a single red leaf looked like it was ready to fall to its death in the plate under the foil-wrapped planter. So I asked her about it.
"Most people don't really know how to care for poinsettias," she said. "The most common mistake most people make with poinsettias is that they over-water them. I wait until the soil is bone-dry and then I give it just a little water and that's all it needs."
I thought about that poinsettia, and I've been thinking about that poinsettia since that visit and its just amazing to me how something so simple can take such good care of a part of God's creation.
Often times we think it's the complicated things that make the most sense. Think about it. When we are looking for a miracle, we're looking for fireworks and brimstone. We're looking for magic wands and fairy dust. The stuff that I find in the Bible informs me that God doesn't do much work in loud places. When Elijah is hiding in the damp caves from an angry king and queen, scripture tells us there was a great wind, and then an earth quake, and then a fire, but the Lord wasn't in any of these things. In I Kings 19:12, scripture reads, "And after the fire came a genlte whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave." The Lord was in that gentle whisper. In 2 Kings when Naaman, a commander in the army of Aram, goes to Elisha to be cure of his leprosy, he's actually offended when Elisha's messengers tell him that to cure his skin problem he has to wash in the Jordan River seven times. "You could have just called on the name of yorur God," Naaman protests, "and I would have been healed." But that's not what God's instructions were. So Namman finally does what he's told and his skin problem clears up. Incredible. In the New Testament, a woman fights her way through a crowd and touches Jesus' cloak. She fesses up to her actions when Jesus calls out to the crowd to find out who touched him, and she tells him she knew if she could only touch his cloak, she could be cured of her health problems.
This is how God works: in the stillness and in the quiet. Miracles are not big and flashy. They are not accompanied by fanfare or fireworks, although the result of miracles often makes us wish we could follow up the miracle with those things. Miracles are blessings from God that often come from unexpected places with an unexpected amount of stillness. We don't expect the savior of the world to come in the form of a baby in the night and we certainly don't expect him to then allow himself to die on the cross. But that's what happens. Our faith story is rooted in the fact that both of these things happen, actually. It's pretty incredible to me how as almighty as God is, that's how quietly most of God's miracles happen.
The fact that the poinsettia was still thriving was astonishing to me. I've never seen one this late in April still look like it looked Christmas Eve. And yet there it was, looking as fresh and as well-kempt as ever. All she did, this member of my church said, was check the soil and when it was bone dry, she would give it just a little bit of water. Nothing else. No fanfare, no fireworks. Just a little water on bone-dry soil. If we stopped always looking for God in the big things and started to take time to notice how present and incredible God is in the simple, small things, we might find that God really is doing some incredible and amazing things in our lives. My hope and prayer for you today is that God helps you to take a little time out of your life to find God in the small, simple things. See God in the mundane. Hear God in the silence. Feel God in the stillness. Know that the Spirit of God dwells within you and is always working in you and through you.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Becki
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