Glory 24 - Unexpected
I have never been much of a fan of gardening, yard work, etc - maybe other than mowing the lawn. But as a homeowner, it is a thing that needs to be done. We have this one tree in our yard that drops these little spiky balls that we all despise and we bunch fell after we had done the big yard cleanup last Fall and they've been just taunting us for the last several months. My wife and I finally gave in and got to work on them the last few days. As I finished it up today while silently grumbling about them and the ivy that they were buried in, there was a beautiful surprise - this one little flower peeking out at the base of our house that could easily have been missed in the midst of hacking at and pulling at the ivy and the spiky balls. It was beautiful enough that I needed to stop and just celebrate this little glimpse of beauty.
And it beautifully fit the devotion for today and the glimpse of Glory that Curtice wrote about. She told the story of an incredible unexpected blessing from a stranger. A gift that replaced a loss that was going to be hard to recover on their own. She ended it with the following:
The fire of God comes to us in moments such as these, where grief meets deep gratitude. We grieve and then we receive, and these events don't always make sense to us in our time and in our way. But the little circles God draws in our lives, the connections from one person to another, the meeting of needs, the kindnesses that are poured out over cups of coffee and nights of thankful tears - those are the things that make up a Kingdom of glory, heaven come to earth, holy moments that give themselves to us in ordinary places, light born from darkness.
Or beauty even in the midst of ivy and spiky balls.