The Flower

On Wednesday evening March 28 our aunt, Wanda Richardson, went home to be with Jesus. We buried her body this past Saturday. It was a beautiful ceremony and yet peculiar. Peculiar for two reasons. First, this is the first funeral for my mom's family where there were very few tears. It was very much a celebrated homegoing rather than a farewell. Second, for the first time a member of my mom's family asked, no insisted, that the gospel be presented at their own funeral. Aunt Wanda's final concern as she left this world was her lost family members and friends (two in particular).

She lived a full and Godly life. She was a faithful member of Calvary Baptist Church in Maclenney, FL for 26 years. The only way I know of to honor her life is to share Christ with someone who is hurting, to demonstrate the love of Christ with those in need and to live the gospel of Christ every day of my life.

Wouldn't it be perfect to honor one of God's flowers by sharing the love of Jesus with a homeless person today, or showing kindness to a street kid, or reaching out to a battered mother, or sharing the gospel with someone in jail? If you have two working hands and two working feet, nothing should keep you from joining Danny and Meredith at Trinity on April 14th!

I found a poem that expresses the essense of aunt Wanda's life far better than I could. Read it and let it bless you today.


THE FLOWER
George Herbert

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an houre;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell,
We say amisse,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were;
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offring at heav’n, growing and groning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joining together;

But while I grow to a straight line;
Still upwards bent, as if heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide:
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.