Beauty surrounds us, but we usually need to be walking in a garden to know it - Rumi
The roses in the garden are blooming profusely now. This means that a regular task each day is to cut off the dead blooms since otherwise the rose will put all its energy into producing seeds, as is only natural for any plant. However, if those seeds were allowed to ripen and were then planted out, the result would not be a deep salmon Duchess of Atholl rose, a golden yellow Peace rose, a strident red Super Star or even a multi-coloured Masquerade rose. No, what would grow would be a simple, single, soft, rather pretty pink rose, a wild rose. You see, each rose sold commercially is grafted on to a wild rose root stock from which the graft takes its strength to develop the beautiful flowers we so prize. It is a fact that without being grafted on to that stock none of the huge variety of roses sold would exist.
We might look at our own life in a similar manner. God created each of us on His strong root, (in His own image) and the Holy Spirit sustains us enabling us to blossom as He wants us to do. Speaking to his farming audience Jesus used a similar analogy when He spoke of Himself as the true vine and us as branches of the vine. 5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. 6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. 7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. 8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. John 15:5-8 AKJV. Verse 5c is important here ‘for without me ye can do nothing’ In the same way that the commercial rose cannot produce its flowers without the wild rose root stock so we are unable to develop fully as God intended us to without the strong root stock that is God.
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AuthorI am an Authorised Local Preacher in an Anglo Catholic parish church, in the Diocese of Essex UK Archives
February 2022
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