When I was a little girl, one of my favorite spring pastimes was plucking up dandelions and other beautiful blooming “weeds” from the yard and weaving their stems together for bracelets and necklaces. I grew up in a tiny farm town where everyone’s yard was a blanket of yellow and dancing honey bees. The ditch was another favorite hangout, full of “crawldeads” and frogs and turtles … even an occasional minnow would find its way down the trickling stream.

One of my greatest childhood mysteries was the town “Loafer’s Convention” where all the women scrambled around serving and cooking chili dogs and homemade pies and the men sat around eating peanuts and dropping the shells on the floor. I never understood why they didn’t put their shells in a bowl, or who would clean it up when it was over, or what “loafers” meant. I always thought it was in honor of somebody’s shoes. 

And today I wonder, does the world captivate my children like it captivated me? Where is God in their world? For me, God was under the covers with me where I trembled from bad dreams and was too afraid to get out of bed. God was under the walnut tree with me when my Mom told me that Goldie, my cat, was probably never going to come home. God was on the school bus with the boy I went to church with, the one whose stepfather would beat and control into oblivion. The boy who never had a birthday because he was born on Christmas Day. The boy who grew up to face a drug addiction and prison. The boy who is still finding his way.

Which brings me all the way back around to those dandelions. All the grownups seemed to hate them. They cursed them and poisoned them. They were the most beautiful things in the world to me. They were a limitless supply of wishes.

That boy was a lot like those dandelions. He was hideous to some. He was poisoned and trampled on and left for dead. But to God he was handcrafted, delicately placed, and brilliantly golden in God’s light. Being a dandelion himself, I think Jesus has a very special plan for this young man. He is a limitless supply of dreams and wishes, just waiting for the breath of God to blow upon him.

I wonder how many beautiful dandelions are dying to dance today. And I wonder if the breath of God in me might have a chance to blow today.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 11:18 PM.

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