Consider the Wildflowers

Earlier this week I spent some time in Southwell, and wandered around the Minster Gardens. The gardens are beautiful and time and care has been put into making it a good experience to visit with different things to look at and explore and the most beautiful array of flowers. Towards the edge of the garden is a circle made up of wild flowers - you can walk down the middle of it where a circular bench is placed. Sitting on that bench you are surrounded by all the colour and activity that comes in what, I suppose,  you might describe as a meadow of wild flowers. 

There were poppies and cornflowers and daisies and pink flowers and yellow flowers and bees buzzing and the sounds of birds in the trees around. It's the kind of place where being still is the only option and it soothes the soul. 

As I was sat there I was thinking about the verses in Matthew 6:25-34 that remind us not to be worried - like the birds who get on with the day as it is and the flowers that look beautiful and just grow like that. I'd had a dream the night before which had shaken me a bit and I'd woken up a little anxious - I was reminded of one of my daily readings which had included these verses, and as I looked at the flowers I wondered how considering them might actually help. 

Life over the last few years has felt like a London public transport journey - the kind where the times all match up and you step from tram to train to tube without pausing for a breath. The uncertainties over what's ahead, over the changes in government, over the cost of living, over how much to use the car, over what is coming next..... they have been never ending..... and at times it has been difficult to imagine a time when the movement might stop. 

Reflecting on those verses as I thought about the wildflowers I stopped at the place where the wildflowers stop. We so often read those verses as a whole, which is where they belong, attaching them to an encouragement to not worry or be anxious, but perhaps sometimes we just need to stop and stare before we move on. 

Consider the lilies. Consider the flowers. Consider the wild flowers. 

In the middle of that circle of meadow, everything felt right. That stillness, that time, just to bask in the beauty of the colours and listen to the sounds of the world simply being was a thin place where God's creation made everything well for now. 

We don't need to wonder how considering the flowers might help, we just need to consider the flowers, because those flowers, in that moment, contain everything needed to mean the next words and verses can find a place to be at another time. In that moment, the song that the flowers sing is the only song we need to hear.

Consider the wild flowers - their petals, so neatly shaped and not quite but nearly uniform, their colours so vibrant, bringing diversity as they thrive alongside others so different themselves. Consider the wild flowers, so carefully made by God, intricate, resilient, delicate, full of life. Consider the wild flowers, who tell something of the effort and care God puts into you and your life. Consider the wild flowers, they have a beautiful story to tell.