Grow Where Your Planted

I sure love flowers. I love to look at them, smell them, touch them, and just generally enjoy the way I feel when I'm around flowers. I can remember being a little kid and wanting to be a florist. Little did I know that I am the serial killer of flowers and that career was not meant for me! I guess you could say that I love flowers to death because I kill them. I start out taking care of them and then before long I get tired of it and they die. We have bushes at our house not flowers because bushes tend to take my abuse alot better than delicate flowers.

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I have watched as friends planted their flower beds year after year. I sit on their steps and chit chat with them while they work and I am intrigued how much thought they put into placing the flowers. Each flower seems to be placed with such thought and attention to detail. They are grouped by color, type, size, shape and probably more than I can even think of. And when their flower beds are in full bloom they are just gorgeous. I love to pull up to their houses and see their works of art.

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But, have you ever noticed how flowers stay in their place? No matter what you do to them they don't take off and grow where they want to grow like ivy or the ever hated kudzu. A flower stays put right where it is planted. It doesn't veer off it's course. It doesn't even wrap around the flower next to it. It just stays right in place and grows.

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Too bad we don't do that as Christians! We tend to get off center. We tend to get wrapped up in unnecessary drama at church or in the community. We tend to veer off our course and before long you can't tell where we end and someone else begins. Each part of our body is there for a purpose and each Christian is a part of the body of Christ with a purpose. Our talents, our resources, just us being us is used to make the body of Christ run like a well oiled machine. "...we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work." Ephesians 4:15-16 Maybe it is time to quit complaining about where we were planted and just start working on growing because after all we were planted in that particular place, that particular situation for a reason! God is the gardener, he knows exactly what he is wanting to see when his flower bed is in full bloom!