Flowers in November

"...give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

1 Thessalonians 5:18

It was the first week of November when I saw them: gold and purple flowers sprinkling the sunlit path by the lake. And I may have gasped audibly at the sight - flowers in November?? In Minnesota?! I can hardly remember noticing such a thing before. (I looked it up - this is not highly unusual for more hearty flowers. But it caught me by surprise because to me, November in Minnesota basically equates to winter.)

And I was bursting with joy at this sight, feeling grateful for the small things. Even more so because I’ve just been on a gratitude journey of sorts where I spent a season paying attention to all the wrong things, neglecting to give God thanks and wading in the waters of discontentment. I’ll give you the short version…

It all started last November with a potential job opportunity at my kids’ school. This is it, I thought. This will solve all of my problems. I’ll be a better mom having some time away from my kids. We’ll get a discount at school. We’ll have a little extra cash, and life will be better and easier.

Or so I thought…

As it turns out, this seed of an idea grew into a weed - overtaking much more time and thought than it deserved. And as I read this quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair a few weeks back, it echoed to me my own experience: (for context, “the Lady” represents the devil, and the children are on a grand adventure for Aslan, who represents Jesus. The Lady tells the children if they find this town called Harfang, their lives will improve greatly.) “...whatever the Lady had intended by telling them about Harfang, the actual effect on the children was a bad one. They could think about nothing but beds and baths and hot meals and how lovely it would be to be indoors. They never talked about Aslan…now…And though you might have expected that the idea of having a good time at Harfang would have made them more cheerful, it really made them more sorry for themselves and more grumpy and snappy with each other…” (92-93, emphasis mine).

It’s as if C.S. Lewis was reading my mail. I can see it so clearly now - my joy dissipated as I ruminated over this prospect of working. I began to notice all the hard things about being at home (which wasn’t difficult to do), and this reinforced my “need” to make a change. As everything that was “wrong” with my life multiplied before my eyes, I started to believe this lie straight from the lips of the devil: If my circumstances change, so will my contentment.

And this all happened gradually and subtly, discontentment discreetly infecting my heart and my mind. The grass was looking greener on the other side, somewhere other than where God had planted me (this is not a commentary on working out of the home vs. in the home, but rather obeying the voice of the Spirit as He calls each of us uniquely to our own motherhood journey). And as I stopped noticing the gifts of God and ceased thanking Him for the beautiful parts of being home with my children, I stopped finding them.

Here’s what I’ve discovered to be true: what you focus on, you will find. This is both spiritual Truth and scientific fact (listen to Susie Larson’s interview with Dr. Lee Warren for the brain science on this. It’s wild.). What you notice will inevitably increase, simply because you are looking for it. I’ve experienced this in my life, and with the flowers in November. Once I noticed the flowers, I saw them everywhere! I couldn’t escape these floral graces - they seemed out of place in the fading world of fall. It was wild to me - how had I not seen them before? How had my eyes failed to observe something so lovely?

Gratitude starts with noticing, and then it grows from there. Gratitude is like these glasses, these lenses that God lends to us, allowing us to see all He has provided. We have to choose to put on the glasses, to see life in a new way, paying attention to the gifts. The more you give thanks for the gifts…the more you notice the gifts. You offer gratitude to the Giver…and suddenly, you can’t believe all that He is providing. You see flowers everywhere - the blessings and abundance and goodness of God blossoming before you.

The third week of November, we went to a flower arranging class - my mom, sister and me. And it was this little piece of Paradise, the fragrance that enveloped us when we walked in the door. There were hundreds of flowers of every color and kind, and I wondered, Will heaven be something like this? I chose these pretty purple and pink blooms, as per my daughter’s request.

And isn’t that sort of what God does for us? I imagine the hand of God picking out flowers from heaven and delivering them down to earth, to each of us. He knows your name and your address. He knows the exact flowers, the gifts that you need at exactly the right time. He sends flowers on the good days and in the hard seasons - the valleys of life. He’s handpicking flowers, choosing them specifically and personally for each of us.

We so often believe that if we can somehow skirt our circumstances, contentment will follow. But in the upside down, right-side up way of our All-Knowing King, gratitude (not ease or comfort or prosperity or success) is the route to contentment, the means by which we will experience the joy that God so longs to give us. Gratitude protects us from our own demise by discontentment, allowing us to receive and breathe in the goodness of God, the flowers that He so intentionally sends to us.

This is not automatic. This is a practice, a daily decision. And it goes against our nature and our image-driven, instant gratification culture. We are going to have to swim upstream on this one - contending for contentment day after day, intentionally deciding that we will “give thanks in all circumstances - for this is God’s will for [us] in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

And so, I’ll spare you the details - I worked…and now I am back home. And so are my kids - I am homeschooling. I am treasuring my time at home more than I have in months, relishing in the fact that gratitude is coming easy. I know it won’t be this way forever - soon I’ll be back in the grind or the grass will be looking greener somewhere else. But I hope and pray I remember it then, this revelation that feels so fresh right now - Jesus is enough, and I have everything I need in Him. There is much to be grateful for. The grass may look greener over there, but there are flowers here, too.

Just as my bouquet from the flower shop started to droop, my husband came home with a beautiful arrangement of fall flowers on our anniversary. There they were again: flowers in November. The flowers outside had since dried up, fainting in the cold, but God was still finding a way to deliver goodness as He always does. We may not see flowers in Minnesota again until May. But God has gifts in store for every season, and I’m convinced now more than ever: He’ll never stop sending us flowers.