God Can Take What's Broken and Make it Bloom Again

Happy Fri-YAY, Friend!

I have a favorite rose color - it's one that is a blend of yellow, pink, and like an orange sherbet. My grandmother had one in her rose garden (her beautifully maintained and stunning rose garden, I might add). So, last year, as we finished the repairs to the front of the house and and built the front porch (if you don't know that story, here's a video: https://halleebridgeman.com/blogs/news/2023-in-review), we looked for that rose and never could find it. This spring, Gregg and I were checking out what our local Lowes had as far as landscaping options, and in their clearance plant section, they had several of these very roses that I love. They were in pretty bad shape, but I wasn't afraid of that.

A couple weeks later, on Mother's Day, I planned to buy the flowers and such we'd planned for the landscaping. I met my daughter for a Mother's Day tea in Lexington, and then stopped at their Lowes to see what they had in the clearance section. (Something I learned this year is apparently every mother in the world shops Lowes on Mother's Day for plants - I'll not do that again next year. It was like 1983 Black Friday in the Cabbage Patch Kids section of the store.) They had the roses I wanted so I bought all four they had. They were seriously discounted - just $10 per bush. This is probably why:

Gregg had already built the flower bed they were going into. So, I came home from my tea, changed out of my "high tea dress" and started planting roses and flowers and just enjoying having my hands in dirt again. But, as I pulled one of the bushes from the bucket, it snapped at the base. Two things upset me about that: 1) I'd started on the ends and worked to the middle so that they'd be evenly spaced, and this one was a middle one, and 2) I hated braking it because I wanted to nurture it and make it happy after being neglected in the clearance section.

But, I planted it anyway. Then I trimmed all of the dead and icky parts from the other three bushes, gave them some attention and care, and before long, they were thriving. My prayer was that the one I broke down to nothing would grow back. You can see its two little stems sticking out from the soil:

You know what? It did! It grew stems, leaves, started bushing out and growing into the plant I'd put in front of it to hide the gap. This morning, I went outside and the little bud that I'd been watching for the last few days was beautifully open.

God can do that with us, too, you know. Trust me, after everything that our family has gone through in the last couple of years, I felt broken down to nothing. Nothing in our world was right. Our home was destroyed and all of our things were in storage because we lived in a construction zone. Gregg's body was broken and his strength was not what it used to be because of the damage to his arms. And, worse than any of that, our son was dead - gone forever. And as the days turned to weeks turned to months, the forever really started to sink in. We had little energy beyond just getting through each day. All of the joy in our life was shadowed by the deep grief.

But gradually our home is coming together (it's still getting there but there is a light at the end of that long tunnel). We have moved from just existing to living to thriving again. And while that shadow of grief is still there, we have learned how to grow around it. Gregg's strength has returned and he is able to do all the things in the house he wanted to do but had to wait to do. He and I are back to writing, collaborating on ideas and books, and working out plot points in my current book. We're blooming again. And it's lovely to have beauty back in our lives.

Here's that flower bed this morning. Now you can hardly tell there was ever a gap there in the first place.

So when I started out writing this, it was intended to morph into talking about flowers and the story of the mis-delivered flower arrangement in my free novella, Ian (formerly Courting Calla). But I like where the Holy Spirit led me to write about instead. 

But if you haven't read Ian, it's free all the time. It was a lot of fun to write as I created that world of the Dixon Brothers. Click the picture to get your copy today and enjoy reading about those flowers.