Shared bounty

Love grows when shared.

It's almost time to cut back roses and remove the dried, stalky remnants of white mop-headed hydrangeas that litter our yard in February. Today's sunshine beckons but I'll not answer the call just yet; I can find much to do indoors. But just seeing the beautiful colors above reminds me that spring is not far away.

Mary Jane Henley, a dear lady and beloved grandmother of Mary Jane Davis Meyer, shared these delicate roses and wire fern from her yard with me in the fall. She also brought the luscious guava - an unusual fruit I had only known in a Barbara Streisand song decades ago - that she uses to make guava jelly. Her graciousness in giving in many ways touches the lives of anyone in her path. It is her roses that I am smelling today, even if only in a photo.

We stop and smell the roses anytime we pay attention to beauty...or we pause and take delight in our blessings...or we choose to look at something with a fresh appreciation for its value. I think it is a wise way to live.

Let us not run slipshod through life, content with hitting the high points as though we are skimming some required reading just before class, expecting we'll have time to get it right later. This is the real thing! This day is its own, never to come again. We KNOW that, but we rarely live its truth.

Except for a precious woman named Sarah. She gets it. Sarah knows the value of a day....of 'each second of my life' as she speaks into her laptop recording her blog note, sarahchidgey.blogspot.com/2011/02/252011.html. Sarah's sense of urgency in appreciating the day that is hers stimulates my own desire to make the most of the time we have.

When Sarah leaves M.D. Anderson hospital tomorrow, she will go 'home' to a home that is not familiar to her. She will move into Bennett and Sam's first floor home because she can no longer climb the stairs to her own. She and her husband, Eric, will begin a new chapter in their sixth month of marriage in a borrowed home with loving friends, Dustin and Elizabeth, who are helping to care for them. She displays great courage and faithfulness in her young life. I stand amazed. This is the body of Christ in action.

So maybe that welcome sunshine outside is calling my name after all on this Sunday afternoon, even if just for a brief walk. It has been icy and dreary and cold for so long. Sarah would walk in it if she could and not think twice. But she can no longer walk.

What am I waiting for? I'm taking my own advice....

Do something to savor this day. And pray for Sarah.