Blooms in December

 

This amaryllis was from a lady who gave her whole huge pot of them to Aunt Kathy's cousin; Mary Lou.  Kathy had them in her front yard...the whole pot of them actually, one fall and gave both Gail and I a few of them.  They are super determined to survive because I do just the bare minimum to care for them.  They bloom, then leaf out.  I keep them in the house until it gets warm enough in later Spring to leave them out on the porch.  I leave them on the North side of the house, under the air conditioner, so they get the condensation dripped all over them.  I bring them in before they freeze and generally just let them die back. I do fertilize them occasionally over the summer and fall. Though I am really not sure if they need it or not.  The leaves just naturally die back.  I vaguely know they need a dormant period, where the leaves die back, but I don't know when exactly that is supposed to be.  This year the leaves had died back during the fall...I mean like in late September I noticed them dying back when they were still on the porch.  I brought them in and stuck them in a closet (I did put them in a box lined with a plastic trash bag to help with the potential mess of course) and forgot them.  Then late November I went to get into that closet to take inventory on the Christmas gift bags and wrap and found this:


Very determined to bloom; even in the dark closet.  

Perhaps there is a lesson here.

I feel like even when I think I am in the most stressful, darkest part of my life, I ought to try to do what I can to bloom, to better myself somehow. 

The older I get seems like the more I worry.  I know that worry is just myself taking things back out of God's hands, instead of trusting him.  I need to try and go to sleep at night knowing that it's all in God's hands, and my staying awake fretting over it all isn't going to solve anything.

The older I get the more I feel like maybe I have nothing left to give to God, to life, to my family.  And I know that is a lie, of course, in our Advent Bible Study today we talked quite a bit about that.  God used older people in the Bible on a regular basis.  I know that as I grow on in my over-50 years there is plenty that the Lord will use me to do, just as He used any number of older women in the Bible. 

Life is just getting going for me. It will be fun to see what comes next.

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