It is June, and my roses are blooming! In the space in front of my garage, next to my driveway, you will find a lovely large dark red rose bush with bright yellow stamens. It is a full, informal and open faced rose. The long arching canes loaded with green leaves curve upward toward heaven before gracefully diving into the chrysanthemums growing next to it. This spring, the bush is quite spectacular, and it is bursting with blooms. Its burgundy blossoms reminisce of old world classical music and refined and stately beauty. –The problem is that this particular rose bush is not supposed to be there!
That spot was where I had planted a Rosie the Riveter rose bush in 2018. Rosie the Riveter is a yellow- peachy colored rose with pink washing up on the edge of its petals like waves at the beach. For five years, Rosie has faithfully bloomed in that spot with its pastel palette. Rosie was a hybridized rose, with its showy but tender canes grafted onto more robust roses roots. But this spring, Rosie’s grafted on canes must have died back during the winter and I must have pruned them all off without noticing. –Rosie was now all gone. In its place, the root stock had sprouted and new canes had zoomed up like a racehorse into the open opportunity. The rose bush that I had been tending all spring was not Rosie the Riveter. It was actually Dr. Huey, the extremely hardy and vigorous root stock rose, known best among gardeners for being almost impossible to kill or to prune entirely away!
How many of our lives are like my rose bush? How many of us have grafted onto ourselves a persona that wins contests and likes and nods from all of the right people? Looking at our facebook feeds or our instagram posts, we may look like we have everything all together: the perfect family, the perfect house, the perfect job, all curated into picture perfect poses for posterity. Yet, hidden just beneath all the dirt of our lives, there exists our true selves, the “faulty” soul roots that reveal who we truly really are. And just like the root stock of Dr. Huey, we secretly long to break out of the restraints of who society wills us to be and to become our true and authentic selves.
Proverbs 22:6 has traditionally been translated as “Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it.” It has long been used as a promise to parents that if they train their child to be morally straight, God fearing Christians that their children would always stay solid in their parents faith. Today the ever falling percentages of Millennials and Generation Z who believe in God and who are part of a church discredit that flawed interpretation. Instead the better way to read Proverbs 22:6 is this: “Train up a child in the way that they are bent, and when they are old, they will not depart from it.” Our God given talents, our predispositions and interests, the things that make our soul happy, and yes even our sexual orientations are not things that are chosen. They are gifts from God. They are who we really are. And while we can graft on an alternative and carefully structured facade unto our lives, the roots of our soul long to break free from being buried alive so that they too can have their season in the sun.
Friends, may we prune away all remnants of our facade filled lives and open our hearts and minds to accept and celebrate who God has made us to be, no matter how weird, wacky and wild others may view us to be. Let us love God and others with our whole being, while loving ourselves to the very roots of our souls. For we can all enjoy the classic beauty, the resilient tenacity, and the exuberant explosion of a thousand deep velvety red blooms of Dr. Huey, a lowly root stock rose bush – if we can simply allow it to thrive in a new and unexpected space.
Article printed in the Rockford Squire Newspaper, June 6, 2024
