weeds for the king.

​Easter Sunday (Resurrection Day) is the holiest day of the year for Christians.  It is a moment in time where all hope is realized – death has been made a slave to love and is overcome.  God has redeemed the world.
 
And so on this day we do our best, wear our best, give our best – for God.  We don our finest suits, fanciest dresses, richest foods, elaborate decorations, feasts and parties!
 
And every year, on this day, since becoming a Catholic Christian, I have adorned our front steps and our home altar with Easter lilies – rows and rows of them!  Beautiful, fragrant and perfect white Easter lilies which find a permanent home in my yard after Eastertide each year.
 
But this year, this day was different.  Our domestic church has taken front and center.  Most Christians went without receiving the sacraments and our ability to buy the best and present the best was debilitated.  I felt like my hands were empty.  My cupboards were bare.  My porch steps were naked and exposed.  And the most important house guest in the world (and outside of it) was coming over! For me, it left me feeling a sense of absence or closeness from our Savior in the moments I was looking forward to and cherishing the most.  I got used to giving only the best that I lost sight of what the best gift to give God is – my heart, my true desire for Him.
 
In anxiety, I dug out old Easter decorations and started hanging fake flower strings, slightly molded Happy Easter signs and brushed off cobwebbed baskets.  I made it work.  It was all I had.
 
I went out in my yard in hopes that my previously planted lilies may have miraculously bloomed overnight, having a quiet conversation with God about how He is capable of making it happen, and hoping He did so that I would feel like I had something valuable, something beautiful to offer Him.
 
But they hadn’t.  He didn’t.
 
And then I looked in my grass and saw the small yellow petals popped up and out of place and happy the lawnmower had failed to come by this past week, opening up to the Sun.  Dandelions. Flowering weeds.
 
This time, instead of pulling them and tossing them in my green recycle bin, this time I handled them delicately, put them in a vase with water (and other flowers and weeds) and gave them the center place on my Easter table.  
 
This Easter Sunday, there was no taking in the fragrant smell of lilies or seeing the proclamation of the King in their trumpet shaped petals. No, this Easter I only have weeds for the King.
And the King is happy.  Because even though perfect white Easter lilies are beautiful, it is the moment when we are left with nothing, we are poor and we scrape together whatever measly offering we have and we say, “Here Father, these are for you because I love you.  It is all I have. Forgive me.”
 
And He says, “Thank you for these, they are the most beautiful Easter flowers I have ever seen.”
 
Even at our lowest, at the moments in our life where we feel we have absolutely nothing to give, God reminds us that the most valuable gift we can give him is our heart, weeds and all.
 
#weedsfortheKing #easter #heartsdesire #jesuslives #iamsaved
 
 
 

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