Birthing Purples Out of Yellows

When no one and nothing can lift my heart from long inescapable stretches of despair, God out of nowhere, drops a powerful yet gentle bomb.  One late afternoon when I was in college walking down Session Road it was a still, small voice with the short question "Am I asking too much?"  That came when I was on an extended struggle over a compromise. That single, gentle question would power me for the next few months and years.  Later, the bomb flashed as a gloriously bright shooting star, one of the brightest and longest streaks I have seen up to that point, as I gazed above the Baguio City sky in South Drive, with my mind lost in empty thought, tiredly walking home from post-graduate night school.

A lone purple bloom  I saw tonight!

Tonight, as I walked home at the tail end of a burn-out the bomb came from a small bloom.  I saw to the great surprise of my simple mind, a purple-colored yellow bell.  Yes, I saw for the first time, a yellow bell flower that wasn't yellow, from the same shrub that has been filled 365 days a year for the past two years with yellow blooms.  God knows me intimately that He always knows how to reach my deepest recesses the way no one else can.  He knows I love flowers whether they be live flowers or mere interpretations from nature by souls like Van Gogh.

There were two beautiful purple blooms the following morning

At times in one's life when prayers and even Scripture seem meaningless, God breaks the formula -- as if there ever was one.  He establishes His presence tailor-made for us.  When it comes it speaks without words, paints without pictures and touches without hands.  Then out of nowhere we snap out of the imploding universe in our complex souls and find life-renewing hope.

This reminds me of Hudson Taylor, whose biography I read 15 years ago, at one point in his difficult life in China, said "I could not pray.  I could not read the Scriptures.  I could scarcely even think.  But I could trust."  It comes to each one of us every now and then, despite -- or sometimes even because of -- our constant immersion with God's work.


Why flowers?  How could these small, delicate, transient creations give life?  Why come from these things that open from buds and quickly die few days later?  Maybe because whenever they bloom even for such a short time, they bloom their best. They don't reserve their best for a rainy day.  They have one chance and they give it all away.  They give everything they can and they have lived their purpose.  Whether they get noticed or not.  In my case, they have lived their purpose and I can say farewell to them without regrets, I can say farewell to despair without regrets.

The shrub is full of yellow blooms all year round; at top-right one can barely see the bloom from the last of the purple buds in the cluster

Praise to the God who talks in gentle whispers in a deafening world, Who bolts across the universe in the night sky when He seems so far, and Who delivers a purple flower when everything around is yellow and has turned unbearably dull. 

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Why do I love flowers?  I really don't know why these beautiful things that have been almost exclusively created for women could capture a man's heart; definitely not the smell.  Maybe it's the color.  Maybe it's the variety of their shapes and behaviors.  Maybe it's the thought of hope, new life and the peak of a life cycle that they evoke.  Maybe it's my love for still life and landscape paintings.  Maybe it's my mother.  I attempt an answer in this next post.