Beauty in the Rocky Places

Amidst the craggy, rough boulders on a Colorado mountainside, there grew a rainbow of wildflowers.

This Kansas girl comes from farm country, a place where fertile soil yielded our second best wheat crop ever this summer. Good soil means strong plants, right? Well, it certainly is one factor in the equation.

 

And yet, there in the Rocky Mountain National Park, delicate wildflowers seemed incongruous as their spindly stems poked through rough mountain rock and created a bouquet along the sides of the road and up the mountain passes.

Purple peeked from beneath pine needles that had fallen.

Blooms crowded right next to roadways where thousands of vehicles traverse up winding roads.

The flowers flourish in conditions that certainly seem less than ideal.

Even though we've been home for a few weeks now, I've thought about those flowers.

Like these mountain flowers, we all go through these "rocky places" in our lives.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrew 11:1

  

We humans would like to receive everything we hope for or pray for. But life isn't that simple. There are tragedies - pain, suffering and loss. There are untimely deaths and health scares and job losses and family breakdowns. There are low commodity prices on the farm and breakdowns and uncooperative weather. The list goes on and on.

So how do we keep going in the face of those struggles? It all comes back to faith. We may not see it at the time. It may not be the timing we'd prefer. Hebrews 11 reminds us that Bible heroes weren't immune either. Abraham, Sarah, Issac, Jacob and Noah all had to have faith in a future they couldn't see right in front of them.

The wildflowers bravely winding their way through rock show us there can be beauty in hard places, too.

There is beauty all around ... if only we open our eyes to see it. The beauty is probably not in the situation itself. But it can be found in the people who walk alongside us through difficult journeys. It may not be discovered in the hard moments, but our lives may bloom in other ways after the trial is over.

I ask for eyes to see the beauty in both the fertile soil and in the rocky places ...

 

... and for the faith to make it through.