Miles of Tulips and Some Rocks

There’s something about spring in New England that just simply captures your heart. Everything just bursts to life and there is glory everywhere you turn. It’s magnificent and magical and sings a gentle song of restoration. What was brown and cold has turned mild and green. And then there are the tulips.

Somewhere a few years back, I heard a little rumor about a tulip field. And if you know me, then you know I faithfully plant hundreds of tulips every fall and took a solo 14 hour train ride in college from Vienna, Austria to see Holland in the spring just to dance among those tulip fields. So in New England, to find such a thing almost sounded too good to be true.

But it isn’t friends, it exists. Here’s my post on Wicked Tulips from a few years ago. Oh my word can we have a moment to mom sob over how big those boys are now?! Man! Be still my momma heart. And now there’s a baby girl along for the ride. We love it and go multiple times every year. A sweet annual tradition now.

And its busier now since everyone wants to see the glory of the tulips and my boys are rowdier to say the least. Look at those faces in the picture above as they race like the wind up and down the rows. We come home with tulips that have 18 inches of stem and some where there is just a flower head. No matter how many times you tell them how to pick them, somehow a few whoopsies always happen. But there’s something about being in a field of flowers that just makes your heart sing.

But I noticed something this time, how my little boys kept taking their eyes off the tulips to be down in the dirt searching endlessly for rocks. Yep. Little boys all the way. Kids in general are just drawn to rocks I think. But it spoke to my heart a bit because it resonated with me. Don’t we do that to? Not in a tulip field but in life? We miss the whole reason for being in a particular place or season of life because our eyes are turned down, focused on the dirt of life, the grit, the hard. And in so doing we are missing the lovely all around…the miles of proverbial tulips.

It happens to us all the time doesn’t it. Things get tight, money fleeting, work gets hard and we look down and start kicking those rocks around missing the beauty that if we were to lift our eyes up a bit we’d be absolutely amazed by. I think back over seasons in my life where I just absolutely refused to allow myself to change focus, to see beauty, to find the lovely because I wasn’t ready for good yet. I wanted to wallow and be sad. When we found out something wasn’t quite ok with Cade while I was early pregnant, I absolutely refused to see anything good about that season. I went into shut down mode. I missed the community of love around us. I missed the first flutters in my belly because I was wound up like a top of sadness ready to spin out of control.

There are very real, hard things that happen to us, sometimes without us doing anything at all. Just simply a casualty of the uncertainty of life. And the ache runs deep and our eyes find the rocks. And there’s grace for us in those spots because the hurt is real and warranted. But somehow, even on the not-so-devastating days, just everyday ordinary hard ones, our eyes still turn downwards. To wallow amongst the rocks when if we were mindful of the pursuit of lovely, we could be dancing among the tulips. Oh for grace to see the tulips instead of the rocks. I wish that for you my friends. That you may choose the good work of lifting your eyes up. You may just find acres of beauty all around you. Don’t settle for rocks when you can have tulips.

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