Isn’t it amazing that the delicate blooms and vibrantly colored petals of flowers can bear the scorching desert sun all day long and still continue their freshness? Sometimes day after long hot day?

It is true that those petals will eventually wither, drop and be blown away. Yet despite their fragile appearance, that they can even bear one day of full sun, and still smile up to the sky with joyful faces, is a wonder.

It’s spring in Southern Arizona and there are masses of wildflowers blooming: alongside mile after mile of desert roadways – extravagant growth that delights the eye and lifts the heart; neighborhood parkways and rock gardens are profuse and overrun with swaths of living color; wilderness acreage is painterly adorned with the showy desert display. That all of this should bloom day after day in the full sun. Incredible!

Yes these wildflowers are only for a season. Soon their blooms and their beauty will dry up and be blown away. And then what? Ah, then the plants are hosts to ripening seed. On each stalk where beauty rested in open handed abundance, right there, in the seeming dearth, seed is ripening.

As the blooms and the plants themselves dry up, the seeds (and there is quite an abundance of seed in the remains of only one flower!)…the seeds of a future harvest and display are ripening. The life force of the plant is being stored up in an almost innumerable measure of seeds! Remarkable!

When will they bloom again? At the proper season. The fully ripened seed will be dispersed by wild winds or frivolous little breezes; they will be foraged, digested and resown by the wild things of the desert; they will be watered into the soil by the desert monsoons.

Each seed will fall to the ground. There it will wait for the next season of growth. There it will die. And on a day and at a time, its inner lifeforce will be activated into growth: life pushing up into free-air living, and the joy of it exploding into handfuls of colorful blooms at the terminus of its growth.

And what about our lives? Our mortal lives that so soon fade or wither or crumple before the elements? We mortals also experience a post-bloom season of life – a season of drying up. Is that the end for us? In some aspects – yes, the beauty has flown. But there is also another wonderful process taking place. Seed is ripening.

Human beings, though mortal, have an intrinsic value. God has placed that value upon our lives in the very mechanics of His creation of us. Our lives are designed to be repositories of much value. And there is a ripening process in life that ripens seed for a future harvest and blessing. The flower may fade and wither, but seed is ripening. Take heart.

“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.
The grass withers, and its flower fall away, but the word of the LORD endures forever.” (I Pet 1:24-25)

“Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matt 6:30)