The sky was angry with a horrible shade of gray, and my sister sounded a melancholy tune through the speakers.
Funny, even Harlow and my niece and nephew were quiet in the backseat. The moment was rich with solemnity, palpable to even the deadest nerve.
It was late October, almost Halloween, and my attempt was to escape home and the pain that had transpired in the previous seven days, but even six hundred miles away, the sting had managed to find me and sawed away at my heart.
I need to find a symbol, I thought. But what?
My heart was hardly in the game that my brain had started, and I closed my eyes firmly, reminiscing about the phone call I'd had the night before.
Choose a symbol, the phone counselor had advised me. Something between you and God. And every time you see it, remember God and His faithfulness.
Truth be told, it sounded a bit hokey to me.
But she went on.
Pick something, anything you like. I knew a woman once who loved lighthouses, and even though she lived in Kansas, that was her thing between her and the Lord. And you know what? Lighthouses started popping up in her path. On stickers and pictures. And each time, they reminded her of God and His great love for her.
God was to be my Husband for this season, she said, citing a passage in Isaiah. My Provider and Protector.
God? My husband? It was nice but a little hard for me to swallow.
But the notion kept turning over in my mind, and like a good book, I couldn't put it down.
Okay, God, I mused silently. I don't know. I don't know what to pick. I guess, I don't know. I like pink roses. Pink roses. That's what I pick.
I hardly meant it. But I was willing to try anything to bring me comfort. And if God was to be my Husband, well, then pink roses are what I want. They're symbolic of romance to me, a thing so intimately important to me.
A thing no longer available to me.
I glared out the window and immediately realized the ridiculousness of my choice.
It was almost November. In Texas. I could have at least picked something that I knew I could see anywhere. Like, I don't know, a Mexican restaurant or a boot store.
And I kid you not, not sixty seconds later, I saw it.
One lonely hot pink rose on the side of the highway, bending in the wind but mightily standing against the storm.
I sat up and rubbernecked like a lunatic.
I couldn't believe it.
Tears welled in my eyes as I pondered the graciousness of my Father.
A pink rose. A love note. From a Husband who knew my heart and my pain.
And since then, they have popped up all over the place, always when I least expect it...
A pink rose on the binder of a book nestled among hundreds of others in a used bookstore in Texas. It called out to me, as if it knew my name and had been placed on the shelf for such a time as this.
Pink roses all over the cover of a book on an outdoor store shelf the day after I was left as a single mom.
A pink rose on the counter at my friend's house, during a brunch hosted to support and encourage me.
Pink roses delivered to me on my birthday.
A single pink rose tucked into a Mother's Day bouquet sent "from" Harlow.
Not to mention, my mother had several bushes of red knockout roses planted in our front yard, and guess what...
When they bloomed, they weren't red. We have pink roses in our front yard!
And as I prayed one night, I asked the Lord that if there be some man out there that He had selected to be a future husband for me, could He please...
...maybe...
...just send him with a pink rose, so I know he's the one?
It was prayed half in jest, but it turns out that God has a sense of humor.
Because on a summer evening, with a twinkle in His eye,
...the most significant pink roses appeared on my porch.
WHAAAAAAAT!!!!!!!!! :)!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI must wait until tomorrow????? I don't think I can do it. ;)
ReplyDelete