A Sustaining Abundance

Memories of God #5

I work retail and live in a neighborhood that is not so posh. There are times of stretching to make ends meet. Some of this is a chosen lifestyle, some is just how my particular cookie crumbles.

In my neighborhood, there are deep ditches along the back streets, places for the occasional torrential rain Houston gets to run and not flood. Water often stands in these ditches, but there are also drier seasons, when there is no water in them.

It may be my farm boy early life, where I had acres and acres to explore, but sometimes I have to get down in the ditches and see what's in them. There are wildflowers of various sorts that I can't name, and they give me endless delight. These are not big-blooming, call-attention-to-themselves flowers, but small, easily overlooked blooms.

For example, there is some plant in those ditches that grows very close to the ground. It blooms in small clusters, about the size of a winter coat button. The individual flowers in these clusters are tiny. They are a classic 5-petal arrangement, like we learned to draw in grade school, but they are about the size of a large pin head. I cannot imagine how little nectar or pollen a flower of that size produces, what part it might play in a ecosystem, but then beauty is its own purpose.

I first noticed this flower during a particularly hard stretch a couple of years ago. In the middle of some economic hardship, I spontaneously thought, "What abundance!"

That tiny, tiny flower brought to mind that I live in a world of tiny beauties that add up to something overwhelmingly spectacular. This came to me in a ditch, beside tin warehouses in a not-so-posh neighborhood.

It is not abundance that pays the rent, but it is abundance that sustains me more than the easy payment of utilities. It is abundant life.