ROSE GARDENS                                                                                       

It’s been almost 40 years since Lynne Anderson recorded “Rose Garden”. I know that because I was one of over 3.6 million people who listened to her sing that song on YouTube. The opening words are fascinating: “I beg your pardon; I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there's gotta be a little rain sometimes.” Sunshine and rain do go together. We need both. However, life is really about living in a rose garden, analogies being what they are.

When I was growing up, my Mom had a large rose garden in the back yard along with her vegetable garden. She also had rose bushes scattered around outside the house. They were always beautiful when the roses were in full bloom. There were times when she asked me to pick some roses to put into a vase for us to enjoy inside our home. Doing so was always a somewhat dangerous business.

Rose bushes come with thorns. One must be aware of those thorns when both tending to the bushes and when picking the roses. Many a time I came away with a scratch or two because I was not very careful. On a few occasions those pesky thorns went deep enough that I started to bleed. And while the injuries inflicted by those thorns were not in any way life-threatening, they did hurt.

Isn’t that what life in this life is really like? We live in a rose garden: a wonderful and beautiful world, God’s marvelous creation all around us to behold and enjoy and revel in if we so choose to do so. And who wouldn’t? Who shouldn’t? And yet this world of ours, as beautiful as it is, is full of thorns that cause us pain and suffering. And no matter how careful we are, we will sometimes be scratched. There are times, too, when those scratches will draw blood, real blood.

If we had our druthers and had a choice of which garden to live in, the biblical Garden of Eden or the real world’s Rose Garden, we would all choose paradise, or what is described as paradise. But that is not an option for us. The garden in which we live, as wonderful and as beautiful as it is, is also a dangerous place at times. As much as we might wish it were not so, it is so.

This world has always been a rose garden. That is the way God created this world, the biblical description of The Beginning notwithstanding. While we live in this Rose Garden, we will all receive our fair share of scratches, some more than others, unfortunately. We will also suffer puncture wounds from the thorns that are part and parcel of life among sinful human beings, some wounds deeper and more painful than others. There is no escape and no other Garden to flee to.

But amid all the thorns and enduring all the scratches and wounds that come our way, what still remains is the infinite beauty of the Garden itself. Even more is our faith that in the end, as beautiful as this Garden is, what awaits us is a Garden of unspeakable beauty where there are no thorns to cause any more pain and suffering. When our pain is so deep that we cannot see the beauty, that faith is what keeps us going until we can once again.