I wonder – did her hummingbird brain have any idea about those flowers and that feeder that provided her with sweet food? Did she have any idea how they got there – who had gone to Lowe’s and bought them – how they grew in the first place and how the feeder was manufactured? Did she even connect my wife Saundra and I with the food? Of course, she seemed to tolerate Saundra if she sat still, reading on the porch, but if Saundra stood – or the black and white cat that walks around the neighborhood came onto the porch – the hummingbird buzzed off quickly. And I thought, how very like her most people are, always flitting around.
When the petunias died from lack of water, did the hummingbird just say, “oh, no petunias today!” Or did she think – “That evil cat must have taken them away.” Did she even connect it at all with my forgetfulness or my Saundra’s trip out of town?
Of course, you’ve probably seen the Facebook posting that is circulating about the young adult woman who is complaining about hunters, telling the hunters that they should never kill deer or turkeys or rabbits for meat, they should simply go to the supermarket for meat so no animals have to die. That is a hummingbird brain if I’ve ever seen one.
But the average person in the world around us is a hummingbird about the important questions of life. How is it that we’ve come to be? Why are we allowed to live? Where does our continued life come from? Who took away the sweet petunias recently which makes us have to work harder? Why has God allowed this country to change this century? Few people sit and think about these questions. Most simply flit about, taking the sweet dollar nectar from their work to pay their bills, not even considering that God might somehow be responsible for that dollar. Most people ignore God, perhaps even more than we ignore the latest headlines out of China – or even from Washington or Charleston. Most people simply are looking for the next petunia, the new hummingbird feeder in their life, the next paycheck, the next distraction from thinking.
Luke 17:11-19
Jesus met with ten hummingbirds one day. They were disguised at ten men with leprosy, or, as our translation says, “serious skin diseases.” Because these men had skin diseases, the Law of Moses ordered them to stay away from everyone else, keeping their distance so they would not contaminate other healthy people. These lepers were even required to stay out of the Temple – and this meant that they could not make the sacrifices required to keep a good standing with God. Imagine not being allowed to go to church because you had a skin infection, in a time when it was believed that you must go to church and give at the altar to be right with God. Imagine that no one is allowed in your house, not even a doctor or a nurse. Imagine that you have to keep your distance from everyone, every day, and that it appears that it will be this way for the rest of your life!
The lepers yelled at Jesus: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” And He saw them and told them. “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
By the Law of Moses, a man who is cured must go in front of the Jewish priesthood and show his clean skin and perform certain sacrifices. Then, and only then, he can be welcomed back into the community. Jesus ordered them to show themselves to the priests, implying they would soon be clean.
On the way there, they discovered they were healed, or cleansed.
Just one of them turned around and gave glory to God. Just one of them fell on his face before Jesus. Just one of them thanked Jesus. And this man was not even Jewish, but was a Samaritan, whom every Jew of the day knew were dirty, no-good, not to be trusted. What group of people are your personal Samaritans?
Jesus looked around and said to the crowd. “Didn’t I clean ten men? Where are the other nine? Didn’t any of the others return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” The rest, you see, had continued on their way, looking for the next petunia with their hummingbird brains.
Then Jesus told the man in front of Him this – and listen carefully to Jesus. “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” Jesus doesn’t say “I have made you well” or “God has made you well”. Jesus says “Your faith has made you well.”
And so there is something about this faith that heals us. There is something about recognizing that Jesus has the power and the love to heal us that heals us. In some way, when we recognize that Jesus is truly the Son of God, God walking on this earth in some complicated way, something eternal flows from God through Jesus to us, even though we have never seen Jesus or been touched by Jesus. These men were not touched by Jesus – but this one man connected with Jesus spiritually. He gave thanks and glory to God – and thanked Jesus, falling on his face before him in worship as a slave would do to his owner who held life and death over him. Have you done this with the God that has healed you?
What was the problem with the other 9 men? Were they just rude, not knowing to thank Jesus? I don’t think so, for I’ve seen many other people who were raised to be polite – and yet did not thank God when God did miraculous things for them. I think there is something much deeper, something which we are mostly never taught, something that Christian parents must teach their children for them to survive in a non-Christian world.
These men, like the hummingbirds, did not think about the world around them. They simply accepted the sweet nectar of healing and went to the next petunia. "Some flowers have nectar and some don’t. Just keep moving and look at any attractive flower." That is how they - and most of us - lived their lives.
Folks, it takes training to see the hand of God in the world. It takes training to recognize what is simply an event of the day – and what is God’s hand helping us out. Most people don’t thank God for the miracles they receive each day because we don’t see God buying the petunia, putting the petunia on the porch, watering the petunia, shooing away the cat, and they don’t even see God sitting the chair watching us.
One of the reasons we have "joys and concerns" is to help us who are hummingbirds be taught by those who can see God’s hand in action to see the great works God does for us each day. Parents, tell your children of the great stories that are told here each Sunday – of the recoveries from cancer, the wrecks narrowly missed, the wonderful coincidences that happen when God brings us together with another person, like last week’s story of Saundra meeting my fifth-grade math teacher and the church roof.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my father began selling truck toppers in St Marys. Since he worked shift-work, about one Saturday a month, we’d travel to Fairmont to pick up several toppers on our trailer. And because this was before new Rt 50 was finished, we’d go to New Martinsville and travel to Shinnston. Left and right and left and right, then right and left and right and left. You've traveled that road! And every few miles, Dad would say, “There’s another groundhog!” and point. I missed most of them because I couldn’t see them quickly enough. But eventually, I learned to spot them even quicker than he could.
God sightings are like those groundhogs. We have to train ourselves to see the hand of God in action. And we have to train our children to see God in action. For when you’ve seen God in action enough, no amount of attack by the anti-Christian forces of the world will overcome what you’ve seen happen and know was a miracle.
But the key to seeing God in action is to look with the eyes of our heart and spirit. For, like a superb writer, God likes a good story – and God wants to be the hero of the story, either by direct action – or by putting God’s chosen man or woman in the heart of the action.
But to see with the eyes of our heart and spirit, we must learn to be alone with God. Yet, we don’t want to be alone with God, do we? We have places to go, people to see, games to watch, work to do, activities and entertainments. We never liked sitting and thinking and doing homework in school and we don’t want to do it today. Because it is… boring?
Or is that really the problem? After all, if we go into our room alone, just ourselves and God, aren’t we in a room with the two most fascinating personalities in the Universe? God – and ourselves?
No, it isn’t the boredom. It is the fact that when we are alone with God, God asks us to look at ourselves and tell Him what we see. And we don’t like what we see, especially compared with God who is sitting across the room. We are dull, lazy, evil, ashamed of our past. We want what we should not have, we don’t want to do what we should, we have no power compared to God, no goodness compared to God, and no worthwhile goals when we put our lives up against God. And so we want to leave our room quickly and get away from our conversation with God – or we fall asleep because, honestly, we’ve been distracting ourselves so much from our thoughts and conversations with God that we’ve worn ourselves out trying to stay away from that conversation.
Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and theologian who lived in the early 1600’s and invented the mechanical calculator, thought often about these issues and concluded:
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Try it. Learn to just sit and think and have a conversation with God for ten minutes – few can make it an hour. No phones, not even a book. Just yourself and God in conversation.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
It is in our room, alone with God, that our hummingbird nature comes out. But it is in these alone times that God can pour great gifts of grace to us. It is here when we sit and think about our lives, our dreams, our goals, and what God has given us that we can take time to see what we need to change – and what we’re doing right. It is here, sitting beside the path of holiness, that we can decide which way to walk down the path, a chance to think about where the next petunia will be located that God has set for us. It is a chance to look for where the cat will be hiding, ready to pounce on us. It is a chance to meet the God who set up the world for us to grow in.
John Wesley spoke of “means of grace”. Today, we often call these means of grace by a different name. We call them “spiritual disciplines.” The means of grace or spiritual disciplines are methods where we can receive gifts from God, so I prefer "means of grace".
We’ve all seen or played games like “Candy Crush”, where there are gifts awaiting the player at different points. Life is like that – God has placed gifts in our world for us. And doing certain things will give us more gifts.
For example, there are gifts to be had by reading our Bible. Some think of it as a chore. But actually, if I told you that there is a code in every chapter in the Bible which is worth a hundred dollars, would you read the Bible more? There are gifts buried in every chapter, even in every verse.
There are gifts to be found in church attendance. Every Sunday, we receive gifts from God, either in the sermon, the readings, the songs, or just in the conversations and prayer requests of the people around us. You've been a way for God to gifts to other people today. You just didn't realize it.
Today, I’ve been talking about the spiritual discipline or means of grace known as “Time with God.” It is something more than prayer, for it is two-way prayer, a conversation time. We ask something of God and God asks us to look inside ourselves. And when we look inside ourselves, we receive gifts from God. A good way to start this, especially if we have had a difficult time in our past, is to ask God, “God would you show me the truth about my situation?”
I’ll be talking about more means of grace over the next few weeks. And, in general, let me say that the means of grace that least appeals to you is probably the one you need to attend to the most, for that is where the most gifts from God are waiting for you.
Parents – teach yourself how to hold to these means of grace – and teach your children at the same time. The younger the better – if a child cannot read, then read the Bible to them. If they can barely read, have them read the Bible to you – get a modern translation like the Holman or the CEB or the NIV so they can handle the words. As they get older, have them read a chapter and then discuss it with you or in a group around the table. Our goal is to help them understand that the answers are with God – and not with their worldly friends.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Pascal must have had a five-year old, don’t you think? But his comment applies to children and the average adult, and even to the greatest dictators of the twentieth century. What would the 1930’s and 1940’s have been like if Adolph Hitler could have sat quietly in his room alone?
So many people have the urge to travel, the urge to do something else, the urge to go somewhere different. But the problem with this is that where ever you go, there you are. Where ever you go, you are there. And that is what is most unsettling, for most of us, deep down, don’t like the people we are. That’s why we try to divert ourselves from ourselves, that’s why we have to talk with others, that’s why we watch television, scan our emails and Facebook, strive for new experiences, new restaurants, new toys, new, new, new. We can’t stand to be alone with just ourselves and God for the next ten minutes, let alone for several hours.
Yet one day, we will stand alone in front of God. God will keep us there long enough for us to weep. And we all will weep in shame, for we will truly see how much we have missed the mark. Yet, for those who follow Jesus, we will also weep with gratitude, for we will truly know the love that saved us from the fiery pit. So why not begin to heal, by standing in front of God alone today and asking for the truth which will heal us? Alone, this week, speak with God, do not ignore Him, but stand, sit, lie on your bed, kneel, and ask Him to speak truth to you about your life…where it’s been, where it is, and where it is going. And listen for healing words from the loving God who created you and still loves you deeper than you love yourself.
On this particular day in our reading, Jesus was ignored by 90 percent of the men he healed. They did not think, they did not ponder what God had done for them. Perhaps in some way, that day, the man who came back was healed in a deeper way than the other nine. There is that implication in the text. He came closer to Jesus than the others, who had been healed at a distance. He came to Jesus’ feet.
But why did the one man come back? Because he was thoughtful, realized that this healing meant Jesus was particularly close to God, and that God must be involved. It took a bit of thought. And it took realizing that the hand of God had been present. And so he spent time with Emmanuel, God with us, the part of God who walked on earth, Jesus. He came close. And he was healed by his faith.
Look around you today as you go home or out to eat. Where is God working in your life? And take a few minutes this afternoon. During halftime of the game, turn off the television, sit quietly and ask God – what do I need to be doing with my life?
You will receive another gift – a gift of healing.
I think my friend the hummingbird has gone south for the year. She seems to like the eighty and ninety degree weather much more than the sixties and seventies we’ve been having. For her little body needs that warmth and gets cold quiet easily. She needs to feed on sweet nectar every couple of hours, or she will literally starve to death, so she can’t wait for the flowers to die back before she heads south. She has to stay in the warm sun where the flowers grow. Imagine always living where the flowers grow. Is that what Heaven is like?
There is a BBQ place in rural Georgia, between Atlanta and Augusta where many stop in. Outside the restaurant, there are a dozen hummingbird feeders. And so outside the restaurant, there are often 30 or 40 hummingbirds. Such a beautiful sight. But that is just a rest stop for my hummingbird. She is headed to the Caribbean, or even Mexico. It’s hard to believe that such a little thing can cross the Gulf of Mexico, but they have to stay in the warm sun where the flowers grow.
And so it is almost time to take the feeder inside, clean it out, and put it in storage until next spring. It is almost time to move the petunias inside so we can enjoy them past the frost.
Will my hummingbird friend return next year? They commonly live three to five years, and have been known to live ten years. And so I have hope to see her next spring. Perhaps one day, like the single leper, she will return and thank me for the food I’ve provided when the warm sun returns and the flowers grow.
Until then, as the days lengthen and the holidays approach, take time to sit with God, alone, and talk. Don’t buzz from flower to flower, but sit and talk with God. You might be surprised.
Perhaps one day, like that leper, we will take time to come to the altar and thank God for all that God has provided us. Perhaps we will even spend hours alone with God, talking with the One who loves us more than we love ourselves. Maybe that time will be soon, for the winter of our lives is coming – and we may not be able to find enough sweet nectar. But it is nice to know, that by following Jesus, we will find ourselves one day in the land with the warm light of God glowing on us – and beautiful flowers growing around us.
Jesus met with ten hummingbirds one day. They were disguised at ten men with leprosy, or, as our translation says, “serious skin diseases.” Because these men had skin diseases, the Law of Moses ordered them to stay away from everyone else, keeping their distance so they would not contaminate other healthy people. These lepers were even required to stay out of the Temple – and this meant that they could not make the sacrifices required to keep a good standing with God. Imagine not being allowed to go to church because you had a skin infection, in a time when it was believed that you must go to church and give at the altar to be right with God. Imagine that no one is allowed in your house, not even a doctor or a nurse. Imagine that you have to keep your distance from everyone, every day, and that it appears that it will be this way for the rest of your life!
The lepers yelled at Jesus: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” And He saw them and told them. “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
By the Law of Moses, a man who is cured must go in front of the Jewish priesthood and show his clean skin and perform certain sacrifices. Then, and only then, he can be welcomed back into the community. Jesus ordered them to show themselves to the priests, implying they would soon be clean.
On the way there, they discovered they were healed, or cleansed.
Just one of them turned around and gave glory to God. Just one of them fell on his face before Jesus. Just one of them thanked Jesus. And this man was not even Jewish, but was a Samaritan, whom every Jew of the day knew were dirty, no-good, not to be trusted. What group of people are your personal Samaritans?
Jesus looked around and said to the crowd. “Didn’t I clean ten men? Where are the other nine? Didn’t any of the others return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” The rest, you see, had continued on their way, looking for the next petunia with their hummingbird brains.
Then Jesus told the man in front of Him this – and listen carefully to Jesus. “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” Jesus doesn’t say “I have made you well” or “God has made you well”. Jesus says “Your faith has made you well.”
And so there is something about this faith that heals us. There is something about recognizing that Jesus has the power and the love to heal us that heals us. In some way, when we recognize that Jesus is truly the Son of God, God walking on this earth in some complicated way, something eternal flows from God through Jesus to us, even though we have never seen Jesus or been touched by Jesus. These men were not touched by Jesus – but this one man connected with Jesus spiritually. He gave thanks and glory to God – and thanked Jesus, falling on his face before him in worship as a slave would do to his owner who held life and death over him. Have you done this with the God that has healed you?
What was the problem with the other 9 men? Were they just rude, not knowing to thank Jesus? I don’t think so, for I’ve seen many other people who were raised to be polite – and yet did not thank God when God did miraculous things for them. I think there is something much deeper, something which we are mostly never taught, something that Christian parents must teach their children for them to survive in a non-Christian world.
These men, like the hummingbirds, did not think about the world around them. They simply accepted the sweet nectar of healing and went to the next petunia. "Some flowers have nectar and some don’t. Just keep moving and look at any attractive flower." That is how they - and most of us - lived their lives.
Folks, it takes training to see the hand of God in the world. It takes training to recognize what is simply an event of the day – and what is God’s hand helping us out. Most people don’t thank God for the miracles they receive each day because we don’t see God buying the petunia, putting the petunia on the porch, watering the petunia, shooing away the cat, and they don’t even see God sitting the chair watching us.
One of the reasons we have "joys and concerns" is to help us who are hummingbirds be taught by those who can see God’s hand in action to see the great works God does for us each day. Parents, tell your children of the great stories that are told here each Sunday – of the recoveries from cancer, the wrecks narrowly missed, the wonderful coincidences that happen when God brings us together with another person, like last week’s story of Saundra meeting my fifth-grade math teacher and the church roof.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my father began selling truck toppers in St Marys. Since he worked shift-work, about one Saturday a month, we’d travel to Fairmont to pick up several toppers on our trailer. And because this was before new Rt 50 was finished, we’d go to New Martinsville and travel to Shinnston. Left and right and left and right, then right and left and right and left. You've traveled that road! And every few miles, Dad would say, “There’s another groundhog!” and point. I missed most of them because I couldn’t see them quickly enough. But eventually, I learned to spot them even quicker than he could.
God sightings are like those groundhogs. We have to train ourselves to see the hand of God in action. And we have to train our children to see God in action. For when you’ve seen God in action enough, no amount of attack by the anti-Christian forces of the world will overcome what you’ve seen happen and know was a miracle.
But the key to seeing God in action is to look with the eyes of our heart and spirit. For, like a superb writer, God likes a good story – and God wants to be the hero of the story, either by direct action – or by putting God’s chosen man or woman in the heart of the action.
But to see with the eyes of our heart and spirit, we must learn to be alone with God. Yet, we don’t want to be alone with God, do we? We have places to go, people to see, games to watch, work to do, activities and entertainments. We never liked sitting and thinking and doing homework in school and we don’t want to do it today. Because it is… boring?
Or is that really the problem? After all, if we go into our room alone, just ourselves and God, aren’t we in a room with the two most fascinating personalities in the Universe? God – and ourselves?
No, it isn’t the boredom. It is the fact that when we are alone with God, God asks us to look at ourselves and tell Him what we see. And we don’t like what we see, especially compared with God who is sitting across the room. We are dull, lazy, evil, ashamed of our past. We want what we should not have, we don’t want to do what we should, we have no power compared to God, no goodness compared to God, and no worthwhile goals when we put our lives up against God. And so we want to leave our room quickly and get away from our conversation with God – or we fall asleep because, honestly, we’ve been distracting ourselves so much from our thoughts and conversations with God that we’ve worn ourselves out trying to stay away from that conversation.
Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and theologian who lived in the early 1600’s and invented the mechanical calculator, thought often about these issues and concluded:
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Try it. Learn to just sit and think and have a conversation with God for ten minutes – few can make it an hour. No phones, not even a book. Just yourself and God in conversation.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
It is in our room, alone with God, that our hummingbird nature comes out. But it is in these alone times that God can pour great gifts of grace to us. It is here when we sit and think about our lives, our dreams, our goals, and what God has given us that we can take time to see what we need to change – and what we’re doing right. It is here, sitting beside the path of holiness, that we can decide which way to walk down the path, a chance to think about where the next petunia will be located that God has set for us. It is a chance to look for where the cat will be hiding, ready to pounce on us. It is a chance to meet the God who set up the world for us to grow in.
John Wesley spoke of “means of grace”. Today, we often call these means of grace by a different name. We call them “spiritual disciplines.” The means of grace or spiritual disciplines are methods where we can receive gifts from God, so I prefer "means of grace".
We’ve all seen or played games like “Candy Crush”, where there are gifts awaiting the player at different points. Life is like that – God has placed gifts in our world for us. And doing certain things will give us more gifts.
For example, there are gifts to be had by reading our Bible. Some think of it as a chore. But actually, if I told you that there is a code in every chapter in the Bible which is worth a hundred dollars, would you read the Bible more? There are gifts buried in every chapter, even in every verse.
There are gifts to be found in church attendance. Every Sunday, we receive gifts from God, either in the sermon, the readings, the songs, or just in the conversations and prayer requests of the people around us. You've been a way for God to gifts to other people today. You just didn't realize it.
Today, I’ve been talking about the spiritual discipline or means of grace known as “Time with God.” It is something more than prayer, for it is two-way prayer, a conversation time. We ask something of God and God asks us to look inside ourselves. And when we look inside ourselves, we receive gifts from God. A good way to start this, especially if we have had a difficult time in our past, is to ask God, “God would you show me the truth about my situation?”
I’ll be talking about more means of grace over the next few weeks. And, in general, let me say that the means of grace that least appeals to you is probably the one you need to attend to the most, for that is where the most gifts from God are waiting for you.
Parents – teach yourself how to hold to these means of grace – and teach your children at the same time. The younger the better – if a child cannot read, then read the Bible to them. If they can barely read, have them read the Bible to you – get a modern translation like the Holman or the CEB or the NIV so they can handle the words. As they get older, have them read a chapter and then discuss it with you or in a group around the table. Our goal is to help them understand that the answers are with God – and not with their worldly friends.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Pascal must have had a five-year old, don’t you think? But his comment applies to children and the average adult, and even to the greatest dictators of the twentieth century. What would the 1930’s and 1940’s have been like if Adolph Hitler could have sat quietly in his room alone?
So many people have the urge to travel, the urge to do something else, the urge to go somewhere different. But the problem with this is that where ever you go, there you are. Where ever you go, you are there. And that is what is most unsettling, for most of us, deep down, don’t like the people we are. That’s why we try to divert ourselves from ourselves, that’s why we have to talk with others, that’s why we watch television, scan our emails and Facebook, strive for new experiences, new restaurants, new toys, new, new, new. We can’t stand to be alone with just ourselves and God for the next ten minutes, let alone for several hours.
Yet one day, we will stand alone in front of God. God will keep us there long enough for us to weep. And we all will weep in shame, for we will truly see how much we have missed the mark. Yet, for those who follow Jesus, we will also weep with gratitude, for we will truly know the love that saved us from the fiery pit. So why not begin to heal, by standing in front of God alone today and asking for the truth which will heal us? Alone, this week, speak with God, do not ignore Him, but stand, sit, lie on your bed, kneel, and ask Him to speak truth to you about your life…where it’s been, where it is, and where it is going. And listen for healing words from the loving God who created you and still loves you deeper than you love yourself.
On this particular day in our reading, Jesus was ignored by 90 percent of the men he healed. They did not think, they did not ponder what God had done for them. Perhaps in some way, that day, the man who came back was healed in a deeper way than the other nine. There is that implication in the text. He came closer to Jesus than the others, who had been healed at a distance. He came to Jesus’ feet.
But why did the one man come back? Because he was thoughtful, realized that this healing meant Jesus was particularly close to God, and that God must be involved. It took a bit of thought. And it took realizing that the hand of God had been present. And so he spent time with Emmanuel, God with us, the part of God who walked on earth, Jesus. He came close. And he was healed by his faith.
Look around you today as you go home or out to eat. Where is God working in your life? And take a few minutes this afternoon. During halftime of the game, turn off the television, sit quietly and ask God – what do I need to be doing with my life?
You will receive another gift – a gift of healing.
I think my friend the hummingbird has gone south for the year. She seems to like the eighty and ninety degree weather much more than the sixties and seventies we’ve been having. For her little body needs that warmth and gets cold quiet easily. She needs to feed on sweet nectar every couple of hours, or she will literally starve to death, so she can’t wait for the flowers to die back before she heads south. She has to stay in the warm sun where the flowers grow. Imagine always living where the flowers grow. Is that what Heaven is like?
There is a BBQ place in rural Georgia, between Atlanta and Augusta where many stop in. Outside the restaurant, there are a dozen hummingbird feeders. And so outside the restaurant, there are often 30 or 40 hummingbirds. Such a beautiful sight. But that is just a rest stop for my hummingbird. She is headed to the Caribbean, or even Mexico. It’s hard to believe that such a little thing can cross the Gulf of Mexico, but they have to stay in the warm sun where the flowers grow.
And so it is almost time to take the feeder inside, clean it out, and put it in storage until next spring. It is almost time to move the petunias inside so we can enjoy them past the frost.
Will my hummingbird friend return next year? They commonly live three to five years, and have been known to live ten years. And so I have hope to see her next spring. Perhaps one day, like the single leper, she will return and thank me for the food I’ve provided when the warm sun returns and the flowers grow.
Until then, as the days lengthen and the holidays approach, take time to sit with God, alone, and talk. Don’t buzz from flower to flower, but sit and talk with God. You might be surprised.
Perhaps one day, like that leper, we will take time to come to the altar and thank God for all that God has provided us. Perhaps we will even spend hours alone with God, talking with the One who loves us more than we love ourselves. Maybe that time will be soon, for the winter of our lives is coming – and we may not be able to find enough sweet nectar. But it is nice to know, that by following Jesus, we will find ourselves one day in the land with the warm light of God glowing on us – and beautiful flowers growing around us.
