Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Flowers (10/03/05)
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TITLE: From the Dung Heap to the Dining Room Table | Previous Challenge Entry
By RW Wood
10/04/05 -
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But that manure got used elsewhere, too. My wife has always loved roses, so we had a couple of bushes and some other plants that got generously “dunged” throughout the summer so that we had flowers to brighten the small table in the run down house we called home.
I thought recently, “Isn’t it just like God to turn smelly old manure into fragrant flowers!” From the waste that we so dreaded shoveling out of the barn and hen house, He made the beautiful flowers that we so enjoyed as they graced our table. But really it should come as no surprise that the Lord converts dung into delphiniums and manure into marigolds. After all, isn’t that what He has done throughout human history, both on an individual level as well as on a larger scale?
Consider Martin Luther, wasting away as a borderline alcoholic in a corrupt and decaying religious system, who by the transforming power of God reads “by Grace and not by works” and the Protestant Reformation bursts into bloom. What of Abram, the idolater along with his wife Sarai decaying in an un-reproductive old age suddenly blossoming as Abraham and Sarah, the parents of a nation, or Moses, covered with the smell of the sheep and their offensive excrement and wasting away in the desert when the touch of God causes new life and hope to flower for that same nation which has now gone into slavery?
The most amazing of all is that I had been cast upon the dung heap by a life of sin, yet a transformation that comes through redemption will seat me at the banquet table for the marriage supper of the Lamb. I wonder if that table will not also be graced with bouquets of flowers to remind us of what God can do to turn the wretched into the redeemed, the outcast into the overcomer, and the rejected into the accepted. I wonder if the flowers that bloom at the edge of the dung heap don’t give the sweetest smell when they grace the King’s table.
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Great inspirational work there, hon!