Bloom like an amaryllis

My wife, Lori, and I are not good with houseplants. When she brings home a new plant, I shake my head, knowing the plant’s likely demise. I want to pull it aside and whisper, “I’m so sorry she bought you. I promise I’ll pray for you.”

If plants could muster a police force, they would charge Lori and me with negligent homicide.

So last year, when some well meaning friends gave us an amaryllis for Christmas, I thanked them kindly.

And as soon as they left, I knelt by their gift and offered last rites for it.

Much to my surprise, Lori faithfully watered and cared for the amaryllis. And even more to my surprise, in due time, it blossomed bright red bulbs, a true wonder of nature.

And then we placed it in the garage.

I forgot about it.

Days turned into weeks.

Then, it happened. One day as I was carrying my laptop and books into the house for some evening work, the amaryllis shocked me. I well nigh dropped my armful of work.

That plant had blossomed.

“How did that happen?” I asked myself.

No water; an inconspicuous corner of the garage; no Miracle Grow. But there they were: scarlet red bulbs, grinning at me as if to say, “You can’t keep me down. If you don’t take care of me, I’ll show you and blossom anyway.”

“This amaryllis is the perfect companion to Houseplants for Dummies,” I told Lori.

It had bloomed in an unlikely place.

My amaryllis reminds me of people I know who have been cast into the dark corners of life’s garages and blossomed anyway.

Like Thelma, who is almost 90 years old. She’s been blooming for years, long before I met her. I carefully observed her week after week as she dutifully cared for her husband in the long-term care facility where he spent the last years of his life. Always wearing a smile, she wanted to know about my day and how I was doing.

After her husband’s death, she managed quite well living home alone, until she took a hard fall. Then she was in the same long-term care facility where she had once cared for her husband. Every time I visited her, the same smile was there. “Tell me how you are doing?” she would cheerily ask.

I knew she was in pain.

“How do you keep such a positive attitude?” I asked her.

“You just have to keep on going, doing the best you can, since you can’t determine what happens to you.”

Then down the hall, there’s Mary June, stricken at the age of 49 with a mysterious disease that still has doctors scratching their heads. Confined to her bed, unable to see, she answers my question the same way each week.

“How are you today?”

“Great! I’m doing great.” And she is sincere, though I know she has her moments of doubt and confusion.

I leave humbled, for I am the one who seems to get ministered to when I visit.

There are many such amaryllises in different places. They aren’t hard to find: They stand out amidst the weeds of life, looking beyond themselves to brighten the lives of others, finding the best in whatever circumstance life has dealt them.

They are the ones who choose how they are going to respond to the ugliness of life or simply to the neglect of people who don’t know better. They refuse to let circumstances determine their destiny. They are thermostats, setting their own frame of mind, rather then thermometers, merely reflecting the attitudes and actions of those around them.

Victor Frankl, the neurologist, psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor, wondered why some victims of the concentration camps fought through as best they could while others simply gave up.  He chronicled his experience in the concentration camp in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. The key to finding meaning in even the most brutal forms of existence might be summarized in his statement: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

People can choose to bloom where they are planted. Or they can choose to whither and die.

I tenderly move my amaryllis to a brighter spot and thank it for its blossoms.

A gardener’s dilemma: should I stay or should I go?

A friend and gardening mentor told me when I first ventured into this labor of love called gardening that this hobby should be relaxing. “If it’s stressful,” he told me, “you’re taking it too seriously.”

His words echo in my ears as I stare at the freshly plowed ground, that chore the courtesy of a friend kind enough to break up the soil for me.

It happens every year: “Can I do this? Do I really want to start with the planting, the cultivating, the weeding?”

You see, my garden can be more fickle than the junior high tease who can’t decide on a boyfriend.

One year I had the juiciest corn I had ever chomped my teeth into; the next year, nary a one was fit to eat. One year my lettuce was green and leafy; the next year it was wilted from the beginning. One year my tomatoes could have been models for seed catalogs; the next year you would have thought they were throwback maters from the Dust Bowl days.

And so I gaze upon my plot of unearthed earth and wonder, “How will she treat me this year?”

The words of the punk rock band, the Clash, ring in my mind:

“Darling you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?”

My gardening friends agree that the hardest part of gardening is weeding: It’s constant; it’s continual; it’s consuming.

And I agree with them, mostly.

But, for me the most difficult part is taking the leap of faith to do it, that step into the abyss that is a question mark of IF: If my garden will grow; if it will produce; if it will give back.

Planting requires a step of faith, for without faith, we would never start.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

But, the Scriptures also remind us that, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17).

My friend is right: If gardening becomes stressful, something is out of balance. And some of the labor---like preparing the soil, tilling it, watering it, and weeding it---is evidence of faith in action and not a worrisome or unnerving affair.

So as I stand there at a distance, pondering, I step toward my garden, believing I hear her calling me. How she treats me this growing season has as much to do with me as her. The question of, “Will she produce?” is also a question of, “How much will I invest?”

It’s the law of sowing and reaping: “Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7)

Sowing and reaping aren’t easy. I’m on my knees when I plant, getting down and dirty, pulling and tugging at weeds as I talk ugly to them, sweating through the whole ordeal, and in the end, I plop down, exhausted.

And relieved of stress.

I saw a picture in a magazine of a middle-aged couple gardening. They are laughing as they kneel in the garden together, clothes apparently freshly laundered, no wrinkles, every hair in place, a perfect picture of pleasantness.

That’s not my experience. Gardening is a messy, dirty work for me. I strain, I sweat, I struggle.

But I also do that when I write a sermon or a column, or invest a part of my life in others.

Like gardening, it’s a messy, uncertain business.

But I cherish it.

For I as I work, I am hoping for something.

The harvest.

It’s there, hidden in the ground, waiting to come forth.

And so, I step into the dirt and begin.

“I love you, Mom.”

Archie Bunker, the proverbial “lovable bigot” of “All in the Family” fame, wasn’t very good at telling his wife, Edith, he loved her.

In one episode Edith pauses, furors her brow like she’s really thinking and asks, “Archie, do you love me?”

Archie has no patience for such queries: “What kind of question is that?”

Edith persists: “Do you still love me?”

“Of course I still love you. Why do you ask?”

“You never tell me that you love me.”

“That’s not true. On our wedding night, I said, ‘Edith, I love you.’”

“But I gotta hear it more than that.”

Obviously frustrated, Archie responds, “Whaddaya mean? I told you once. That should be enough. If it ever changes, I’ll let you know.”

For years, I was negligent in expressing those words, “I love you,” although I’d like to think I wasn’t as insensitive as Archie Bunker. The thing about insensitive people is that they usually don’t realize they are insensitive. No one ever shook me and said, “Wake up, you ignorant imp, and tell people you love that you love them.” My awakening to my insensitivity in that area was more gradual, like how the rising sun reveals those weeds in your garden that you noticed earlier that morning but somehow passed over and upon seeing them at mid-day, you say, “Geez, I knew they were there, but didn’t realize it was that bad. I’ve got to do something about that this afternoon.” 

So years ago I developed the habit of saying those three words. I tell my kids I love them every time we talk or text or email.

I tell my wife, Lori, I love her several times a day. Sometimes I verbalize it, other times I text it, and other times I leave her a note somewhere, like next to the coffee pot or on the bathroom mirror.

When she returns from an out of town trip, I’ll go all out and make a poster, maybe with a smiley face or a stick figure of me with welcoming arms, and crude as my drawing may be, it says it. 

I hope my kids pick up on the habit, not just for romantic relationships but for mom, too. It’s important that moms hear their children say, “I love you.”

Lori reminded me of that the other day after one of those times when I said, “I love you.”

“Do you tell your mom that? It’s important that she hears it.”

As a matter of fact, I do, every time we talk.

But I need to call more. Mom needs to hear it more. Two or three times a week isn’t enough.

I can hear mom’s voice lilt whenever I say,  “I love you, Mom.”

“Day-vid” (she almost sings it as she emphasizes that first syllable), that means soo much to me.”

Then she proceeds to tell me how much she loves all of us, “all my boys,” meaning my two older brothers as well as me.

Mom’s 93 years young now and still loves to hear those words, “I love you, Mom.”

But I have to mean it when I say it.  I think of the line in Snow Patrol’s popular song, “Chasing Cars.”

“Those three words

Are said too much.

They’re not enough.”

“I love you,” has to be reinforced by loving behaviors.

But of course there is no possible way my words,  “I love you,” can match Mom’s. I’ve been much more of a recipient than a giver. 

Mom was always there not just with the words but with the heart, too.

So, Mom, you were saying, “I love you,” before I could understand the words. From childbirth to staying up all night  (okay, more than one night) for a sick kid, you were saying it.

From taking me to and from school day after day---even when I told you not to hug me in front of my friends and to please let me out of the car before we actually arrived at Washington Elementary---you were saying it.

You were saying it with perfect attendance at hundreds of ball games and my only piano recital. (Sorry I quit before the second one ever transpired.)

You said it by tapping your foot and frowning at me when I sneaked the car out at age 15, mistakenly thinking I had tiptoed past the home security system called “Mom and Dad.”

You said it with your smile at the numerous graduation ceremonies you endured, wondering if I would ever get out of school.

You said it to us, “your boys,” by instilling in each of us a healthy love for others and ourselves.

You never needed to say: “I love you.”

I always knew it.

But I’m so glad you said it.

Like Edith Bunker, I needed to hear it.