These purple flowers were growing in the desert alongside the path I was taking recently in the desert. There is nothing around them much. There is a barbed wire fence for some cattle which seem otherwise engaged in some distant part of this land. There is a lot of lava which landed in streams and massive foot-ball nodules in the 10nth century. There is some dead grass. No water. No shade. And then this explosion of color and beauty.
The missing plane seems to be on people’s minds these days. It’s on my mind too. A lone survivor of a plane which crashed on a mountain-side in the jungles was recently interviewed, a bazillion gazillion times on CNN. She said some things which seemed to awaken Lent in me a bit. She said that though she was the only one alive, she was also the only one not wearing her seat belt. She also said that she survived seven days among corpses and metal in a jungle until she was found, by doing two things. She drank rain water and she looked past the corpses into the jungle and found it to be stunningly beautiful.
Life will knock us around some. Perhaps bouncing is even better than being tied down. And if we can see past the horrors around us to the beauty around us, we will see that indeed all shall be well even when all happens to be difficult.
