I've been wanting to share with you all, my dear blog readers, what Jamie got me this year for Christmas. It was, by far, my favorite gift, and the reason is, it was just so dag on meaningful.
Back at Thanksgiving, I wrote this post about a radio program Jamie and I had listened to. It was all about being thankful for the thorns in your life. This prayer, by 19th Century preacher, George Matheson, really spoke to both of us:
Dear God, I have never thanked You for my thorns. I’ve thanked You a thousand times for my roses, but never once for my thorns. Teach me the glory of the cross I bear. Teach me the value of my thorns. Show me that I have climbed closer to You along the path of pain. And show me that through my tears, the colors of Your rainbow look much more brilliant.
Well, fast forward a month to Christmas morning. Jamie brings out my gift. This is the first thing I notice... thorns.
I then see the fullness of the first part of my gift. Isn't it stunning?
Along with the vase of four, roseless, thorn-filled long stems, came a wrapped gift and a note of explanation. Jamie explained that in an effort for us to remember the message of being thankful for our thorns, which if you remember my Thanksgiving post, the top most thorn for us is our four miscarriages, he picked four thorny stems from our own rose bush and put them in the beautiful vase. Each stem represents one of our children who are in heaven. I love how he took something as dead and ugly as thorny stems (which is a great picture of how each miscarriage felt!) and displayed them in such a way to make them beautiful, breathtaking even (which is what God has done through our miscarriages). The wrapped gift was to also be a reminder... of the roses in our life. You can probably guess who those are! :) Our roses...
I have never been so touched by a gift before. We have displayed these items in our bedroom and they are a constant reminder of the beauty that can come from the thorns in our life, if we allow God to work His redeeming miracles in us. Thorns do represent pain, but thorns don't just come alone, they are accompanied by roses!
Here is the full display in our room. Isn't it stunning? I just love looking at it. The third piece to the display, the chinese calligraphy piece, I'll explain tomorrow!
Again, I ask, what are the throns in your life? If you'd like to leave a comment, I commit to praying over you and your thorns this very day.
Ruthie
2 comments:
Beautiful! I have had many thorns, but one thorn is knowing that a dream I had is not God's dream. But I know God's will is best.
(Taking a deep breath) I'll be transparent. My thorns are the times in my life when I have been abused. In multiple, ugly ways, two men (one during my childhood and one during my adolescence) hurt me in ways no child or teenager should be hurt. These thorns are painful and used to haunt me daily. They perched on a dead bush that felt to me to have been plopped down in the middle of nowhere, in a dry, dusty land that on one ever visited. The thorns were the memories I carried of what those hands did to me, the words I heard ringing in my ear that I lacked value, that I was plain, and that I would never stand out in a crowd.
The roses? Well, that's pretty much the outworking of Romans 8:28. God used those thorns to create in me a hunger to attend to the rose bushes in the lives of other women. So now, what was my pain is now used to help other people find healing. I love Isaiah 61 and the message of hope it carries. I feel like that's my calling as a counselor. I remember having to face my childhood abuser at a family reunion in 2003. A family member who had moved away, for a variety of reasons, he hadn't visited in a few years. In that moment when I saw him across the room, now a father himself who looked lovingly upon his kids as they opened Christmas presents, the hurt went away. Only God could have given me a fully forgiving heart in that moment. Only God could have taken away the fear and anxiety and anger I felt at my extended family who had welcomed this person back into the fold without so much as a thought as to how that might affect me. Only God could make feel valued and whole and NOTICED in that moment. God showed me his longsuffering nature in that moment. For 17 years, he had mourned with me about what happened. And that day, the thorns no longer pricked as deeply.
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