Beauty in Unexpected Places

Sometimes the most beautiful things grow in unexpected places. I planted sunflowers our first summer in this house, and since then I haven’t sown any seeds. We just let some of the seeds fall, and usually they sprout up in the same flower bed to shade my summer lettuces. But sometimes we find them coming up in very unexpected places. This year, we found a late sunflower sprout coming up in our watermelon bed, but decided to leave it so we didn’t disturb the root system of our fledgeling plants. I didn’t think it would get very big where it was anyway. But apparently I was wrong, and this was the perfect place for this giant to flourish! It brought us so much joy to watch it get bigger and bigger. Every day we went out and exclaimed, “Wow! It’s even bigger today!” It turns out to be the biggest and tallest sunflower that has grown in our garden.

Sometimes life is like that sunflower. We find ourselves in an unexpected place thinking, “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be. All the other flowers are growing over there. This must be wrong.” But maybe that unexpected place is exactly the RIGHT place for us, and it’s where we’ll grow the most. I certainly didn’t set out to grow the biggest sunflower ever this year. I don’t know enough about soil composition or the particular make up of what lies underneath where it was planted. But God does. He knows what lies underneath of where we are and can give us the exact nourishment and resources we need to grow best. It’s so easy for me to see all the ways things “don’t make sense” to my mind, or for my mental attitude to be “I don’t see how this place can produce anything good.” Often God get’s us away from what is normal or expected because we grow best when we are dependent on Him. Being in an unexpected place can produce a deeper faith because it’s easier to see our need for God. I have a lot of this in my life right now, and I’m grateful for God’s gentle reminder to my heart: “Watch and see what I will grow here!” I look forward in faith that it will be the more beautiful than staying where we “should have been.” He always meant for me to grow here. And so, like the sunflower, I too will keep trying to grow towards the Son.