A flower in the grass

The company my husband works for hosts two events this time of the year, a Christmas party and an awards dinner. During the party, five and ten year employees are given service awards. At the dinner, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five and thirty year employees are honored. This company began a bit more than thirty years ago and has grown from a few people to nearly two thousand.

As I looked around the room, I recognized several who are Christians, partly because I knew them, but many because of their countenance. Christians often have a glow on their faces. A friend says that before she became a Christian, she noticed this glow and wondered about it. We could see it in our travels to China a few years ago, and I saw it again last night. I also wondered if the success of this company was due to God’s blessing on so many of His children who work there.

Today’s devotional reading is from a simple verse in Isaiah. It says, “They will spring up among the grass like willows by the watercourses” (Isaiah 44:4).

The author of the devotional points out that the preceding verse says that God’s people spring up because of water poured like floods on dry ground. In regions where rain is scarce, the effect of showers upon parched vegetation is miraculous and growth springs up where nothing seemed to have existed.

This growth is also compared to willows and we know the way willows grow when they are well watered. Eight years ago we planted two of them and two dogwoods in our backyard. In five years, one of the willows became so large that we had to cut it down. Last summer, the other one also had to be removed as it had engulfed the other plants.

In this verse, God’s people are said to spring up among the grass. The devotional author says that the grass could be emblematic of the flesh, just as the Bible elsewhere says, “All flesh is grass.” This reference speaks of the reality that all pride, boasting and even the beauty of the flesh and “all the glory of man is as the flower of grass” which is cut down by a scythe, withers and is gathered into heaps and swept out of the field.

Thinking of grass then as fleshy humanity, Isaiah 44:4 pictures the children of God springing up among the people like flowers among the grass, beautiful objects among the green blades. In another place, Christians are described as lights shining in a dark place (Philippians 2:15). In other words, our appearance is distinct in some way.

This awes me. I’m blessed to see God’s people springing up here and there among the “grass” which everywhere so thickly covers the world. I’m also awed to be one of them. As the devotional writer says, at times I was hidden beneath that grass — perhaps a flower only in God’s sight. My roots were in the dust and I lay undistinguished in the masses of people around me. Yet being a flower, even one of the Redeemer’s own “lilies among whom He feeds,” He dropped the rain of heaven upon me and I sprang up and now flourish like a willow tree.

I also have His assurance that no matter how much I grow, He will give me the space I need. He will prune off whatever needs to be removed, but He will never cut me down.