Rose

The age old question of "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is pounding in my head this week. My friend delivered a stillborn baby this weekend after her water broke at 21 weeks gestation. I have found myself wrestling with all the stages of grief as I've been reading the updates on what they have had to deal with. My friends gave their baby the middle name Rose and I've been reflecting on what a perfectly symbolic name that is for suffering such a major loss.
With spring coming all the stores have been advertising rose bushes and it has been a constant reminder to me to pray for my friends. I was thinking about how a rose bush is such an appropriate metaphor for tough life situations. They look so prickly and ugly in the stores. You wonder how something so stubby and rough could ever produce something beautiful. But when you take a rose bush home, plant it, care for it, nurture it, from it comes a gorgeous, fragrant, breathtaking flower. Sure it will always have it's thorns. Adversity always leaves scars, painful memories. But the flower, the beauty that comes from those prickly stems is what people stop to notice.

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