Crushing Flowers

One morning last week I walked Olivia to school. In order to get to her school we have to walk through an empty field. Although there is no sidewalk, there is a worn path from people walking this same route. We were walking slightly off the path and on the grass. Scattered in the grass were little yellow flowers, or weeds. Olivia looks down and quickly jumps from the grass back onto the path. As she is doing so, she explains we are crushing the flowers! I questioned her on the accuracy of calling them flowers and she proceeded to tell me how beautiful they were and if we stepped on them they would die. 

For the last week I have been thinking about this conversation. Perhaps this is an example of why Christ said we should all become like little children. How many things do we view in life as "weeds." Yet, there is innate beauty within them. Perhaps we don't even realize we treat flowers as though they were weeds. I witnessed an example of this just one day after my conversation with Olivia.

My neighbor is a single dad of two. His children are a girl, about 14, and a boy, about 10. They were exiting their home on the way to school at the same time I was walking Olivia to her bus stop. On this morning, things at their house were apparently not going well. From what I could overhear, the argument of the moment was which child was going to ride in the front seat of the car. Most parents of more than one child has been a part of this battle. However, the father was not entertained with their behavior. The father screamed at the children informing them he was not in the mood for "this crap." (I'm quoting, yet editing his exact wording). I then heard him yell to the daughter "You just shut up! You don't have an opinion in this! You don't have a voice!"

Upon hearing this, I immediately flashed back to my 15 year old self and the verbal abuse I experienced from my mom's boyfriend. This dad was making the same type of crushing statements I heard throughout my teenage years. My instinct was to immediately insert myself into the conversation. My only thought at the moment was "what kind of an example of a man are you being to your daughter?" When she gets older and a man is abusing her, will you be surprised? How will she ever demand to be respected as the beautiful flower she is if her daddy treats her like a weed?

Thankfully my adult self met the Daddy who created me. I'm learning to listen to His words instead of the recording I heard as a teenager. I'm learning I'm not a weed. I'm more like the flower that has just come through a storm. While my stem may be bent and I look beaten up a little, I become a beautiful flower with her head held high again when in the presence of the Son.