Why, When the World is in Chaos, We Need to Keep Tending Our Flowers

Who isn't wakening with a heavy heart after hearing all the news this week about what is happening in Afghanistan?

 If we care at all about the desperation people are facing there, it can be paralyzing. 

It can feel like it's no use to even pray.

(Let's hope we are all praying!)
Is God hearing? Word from Afghanistan is that people are feeling forsaken.

"God has grace for others, but not for us," one despairing person said.

It is tempting to give up anything that we are doing toward the future and just throw up our hands.

To decide that the world as we know it is coming to an end, and we may as well stop now

doing anything about it, and just hide away and hope for the best while expecting the worst.

That is when it is helpful to go out into one's yard and pull weeds and tend the flowers. 

The flowers didn't stop blooming because someone in Afghanistan clung to an army jet and fell from the landing gear.

They didn't stop blooming when journalists in  Afghanistan decided to stay home and wait for death.

They didn't stop blooming when Mr. Biden left Afghanistan to the T a l i ban and went to Camp David to eat ice cream and play golf.

The flowers couldn't do anything about the awful things on the other side of the globe, and so they just kept their faces open to the sunshine, and kept blooming just the same as yesterday.

This doesn't mean that my heart is a flower. I have a mind and a soul, and I have a heart that cares. I have the ability to know God, to know that He is grieved and angry at the atrocities happening, and He is soon going to judge them all. I have the ability to pray, and that I do. All day long. If I heard the news from Afghanistan and chose to forget, to ignore, to refuse to pray because prayer for those in pain creates pain in my own heart, it would be a dereliction of duty. I would not be worthy to walk in white with those who have come out of great tribulation, washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. So I care and I pray.

I also have the ability to write letters to my senators and representative, and letters to the editor.

But then I have to keep going--cleaning the kitchen sink and stove, hanging curtains, pulling weeds in the yard,

                                                                      putting up corn,

editing the next book, taking care of husband and children, ordering school books, blogging.

When we want to go hide in a cave with barrels of water and stacks of survival food, we need to go outside and keep tending our flowers.

I often think of a friar who was asked, while tending his garden, what he would be doing if he knew that he were to die that day.

His response: "I would go on tending my garden."

So when I want to curl up in pain and despair, I go outside and quietly enjoy the flowers, watering, weeding, drinking in the same sunshine that shines on the evil as well as the good.

But, oh God, as I tend my flowers, hear my humble prayer!