Bloom Where You are Planted

Driving past St Vincent's East one day last week I happened to notice a tall stand of cedar trees off on the right side of the road.  Doing a quick count I think there must have been five or six of them and you could tell that they had all been planted at the same time.  It looked like they had been placed there as a cover for some flaw in the landscape and were doing their job well.  However, one of them on the far end was as dead as a rock concert featuring chamber musicians and then one in the middle was about "half" dead.  As I passed on by I immediately began wondering what made the one die and another one trying to follow close behind.  I figure they'd been there for close to twenty years by now, probably put there when they built the hospital.  And they would have all received the same kind of care or lack of it, the same amount of rain and sun, the very same soil, the very same everything.  Yet, something, at some point, happened to make one of those trees die and another one to begin following in its own path of destruction.

Of course, being a person who is always looking for the "more" in something, more of an explanation than what I've been given (not quite to the level of those pesky White House reporters who pepper the president with their endless staccato of question marks but more closely to Alton Brown on "Good Eats") I began thinking about how those trees were such a telling commentary on our own personal existence today.  Like when Jesus spoke in easy-to-understand parables to the people who crossed His path such as the one about the farmer who planted the seeds and how they fared depending on where they landed (some dying immediately, some living but at the first sign of bad weather dying on the vine while some flourished) I think that we humans are basically no different, in this way, from those cedar trees or seeds.

If my purpose for being put here in the grand scheme of things is to be like one of those cedar trees and serve as a covering for some flaw in the landscape then so be it, God had that plan down pat for me before I even born (breech but that's another blog for another day.)  I know He wants us to be faithful and to bloom  no matter whether we're a cedar tree or a giant redwood sequoia right where we are...to bloom where we are planted.