Crepe Myrtle Envy

I have a little bit of a plant fetish. I get crazy excited about bushes and blooms and grass. I am the Blankenship grounds keeper. So it should come as no surprise that when we bought this doosie of a house with all its ailments, I was pumped about one thing: the crepe myrtles in the front yard. There are three of them. I awaited their blooms like it was Christmas morning and prayed hard for bright fuchsia. Dream come true.

I will be totally honest and say that I do not love the three trees equally. The big one is my favorite. It is full and gorgeous. Its trunks are thick and smooth. Its blooms are an amazing shade of dark pink. It is tall. It is full grown, perfectly established.

And then there's my second favorite. It is equally as tall but the trunks are thin and it looks weak. It's blooms are bright pink with white edges so it pales in comparison to its sister plant. This tree is also plagued with poison ivy. I have to cut it away weekly or it starts to choke the life out of it. I blame the nuisance for the sparceness of its branches. It struggles.

My least favorite tree is the one that the previous owners saw fit to cut down completely. In the Spring it started to sprout up in the middle of the grass and I mowed it flat again. I continued doing so for months, until now. We stopped getting rain. The grass got crunchy and I feared the harsh pruning would kill the grass completely and so I let it rest. In three short weeks my crepe myrtle stump became a thriving bush. Today I mowed the grass. Today I looked at that bush and decided it was time to let it live.

Sometimes there are beautiful parts of us that get trampled, mowed over, reduced to lifeless stumps- memories of former passions and gifts. We look at those things with a tiny realization of what they could be but it is but a faint hope compared to the seemingly obvious reality that it is already dead, that it is too late. But God gazes on those parts of us with dreams and hopes and purpose. When the time is right He nudges us with a sweet whisper "It is time to let this live again." And all we have to do is stop cutting. All we have to do is let it grow.

I pray this finds you unearthing old passions, new creativity, real hope. It is time.

[2 Timothy 1:6-7] ♥