Here is your reminder to breathe.

I didn’t tend. I didn’t water, or fertilize, or weatherize. I did prune – once. And yet it blooms.

I look at these roses before me, bigger than my hand, and wonder how such beauty can blossom from such human negligence.

“I planted the seed,” Paul ruminated, “and Apollos watered, but it is God who made it grow.”

It’s humbling, really, this undeniable evidence that the world is is not mine to command, no matter how much I wish it were. Nor does this world depend on the mercy of human attentiveness or ingenuity. This is a wild world. It is God’s world, true, and that only goes to show that God has a wild side – a gloriously vibrant wildness that can’t be quantified or calculated or predicted or outlined in full within dense theology books.

I look at these roses – bright as a sunset sky over a Caribbean Sea, gracefully opening on my table, beckoning me to stop for a moment and savor the sweet perfume wafting from their velvet petals. I consider all I didn’t do to bring them into existence – and I smile.

The whole world doesn’t sit on my shoulders after all.

Even if I don’t plant, even if I don’t water – the wild, wild God of the universe will still grow beautiful things.