Honeysuckle....

I'm sitting here in the "front room" as I now call it, since I also have a "family room", (my kids love to bug me about my little definitions of things like that). I was looking out the window a bit ago at my honeysuckle arbor. It is an old vine, probably approaching 15 years old. I got a start of it from my sister Connie, who got the original start of it from our childhood home that has long since gone to the burn pile. It has sentimental value to me for those two reasons. It is a really cool vine, the trunk is huge for a vine, twisted and bent, gray and aged it has a lot of character. It survived the redo of our entire yard, not even stopping its growth in the least with all kinds of heavy machinery, people and digging going on around it. It just kept plugging along, giving me a marker of serenity, of picture taking even, during a spring, summer and partial fall, of total chaos here at our home. I look at it and see the vines spiring to the sky, many feet above the actual arbor that holds it earthbound. I need to trim it, shape it, and yet I look at the ends and see the potential for many many fragrant blooms that will send its wafting sent into our bedroom for months to come. I love the sweet smell, it reminds me of warm summer days spent at our home on the river, playing, swimming, eating fresh produce from the garden. But even as I enjoy it, love the many aspects of having this honeysuckle bush, I still struggle with it each and every year. It gets aphids, and I mean infested with them. I wait and I wait, thinking that maybe this year they won't invade my poor plant and yet, they do, they come back in full force, taking the life blood out of my honeysuckle. The leaves curl, they look sick and black and then I am forced to take action, spraying a toxic chemical on my beloved plant to get rid of the ugly bugs that consume it and make it less lovely.

The parallel to our life? Well, as I looked at it from my living room/front room window, I thought to myself, you would never know that that poor beautiful arbor was filled with bugs last week, from all distant appearances, it looks fine and yet I know if I go and inspect it closer, I will see dead black bugs all over the place. How many times do I count on, do we count on, others not looking too closely? Not seeing the infestation that has come to take over our hearts, our minds? And what about if I were to be proactive, spraying the tender leaves of the honeysuckle earlier in the year, thereby avoiding the infestation all together? The same applies to our spiritual lives. So many of us know the potential in our lives for "bugs" and yet we wait, hoping they won't come back, hoping that just this one time you will be immune to them. So many of us walk in solitude, not sharing our pain, our need with others, hoping it will be hidden well enough that we will not show it, therefore, just like the honeysuckle, avoiding close inspection. Hmmm....The Lord is really speaking to me about my own heart and the heart of others I love. I don't want to pretend that I don't have problems, that I don't have pain in my life. I don't want others to believe that my life is something it is not so that when the walls come tumbling down (and they are) I won't be thought of as a fake, a fraud. How many times have we looked at the lives of others and misjudged what we saw? Just like me with that old plant I love so much, I look at it in the spring with its new buds and think, well, this year I won't have to do anything with it, I can leave it alone and they won't come back. A month or so later, it is FULL of those nasty creatures....Once again I was fooled into inactivity. What an applicable life lesson for me, and hopefully for you. I will be more proactive in being real, being seen, being known. I will make it easier for others to see the real me and know that I care about them. I will seek the Lord, spend time in His presence, (spraying dreaded chemical on unwanted bugs) I want to be like that honeysuckle and bloom, even when I have things in my life that I know I need to work on, deal with and shed. Will you join me? I'd love the company!