Confused Daffodils

Have you seen them? It’s mid-February and daffodils are popping up everywhere. Along the winding roadside, in neighbors’ yards, I can’t help but notice them, and sigh. How sad that we won’t have our usual fabulous month of daffodils. I know we won’t because one of our Tennessee favorites is pushing up through the soil a month too early.

You see, they’ve all been tricked by this unseasonably warm weather. 

They must be saying to each other:  “It’s so gloriously sunny and warm, it must be mid- to- late March! “ (Uh, yes, I do realize I just put quotes around something a bulb might say ) And so these sweet blossoms stretch up out of the ground, slowly opening their not-ready-yet blooms, and BAM! It’ll be winter again. And all that beauty will be lost just because the daffodils have been looking at what’s happening around them, and choosing to copy every other bloom. And the real season that they’ve been waiting for all year will come but then, of course, it will be cut very short. Sadly most of the daffodils probably won’t even be able to fully open up their happy little yellow faces. They rushed to bloom.   And now they’ve lost their proverbial moment in the sun.

I have to say I’ve been a “confused daffodil” before; more than once, to be perfectly honest, but who’s counting ?

 And it all came down to my patience.  When thinking about various seasons of my life, I find that patience certainly isn’t my greatest virtue.  I’ve rushed lots of thoughts, lots of words, lots of applications, interviews, resume’s, and most regrettably the seasons of God.

Like those foolhardy daffodils, I’d take to looking at my circumstances, feeling the tug of my impatience and the adrenaline rush of emotional immaturity, then I determined that I would decide what season I was in rather than holding still. Falling out of step with that still small voice, misreading the signs through the lens of the impatient and the immature, I’d take my life in my own hands. I’d just take the situation right back out of God’s hands, where I’d placed it so many times before. Well ya know, God’s seasons can be awfully slow in coming and to quote Lady Grantham of Downton Abbey, “there’s nothing more tiring than waiting”. 

And so,  like the daffodils that misread a few warm days in the dead of winter, I  misconstrued the least bit of encouragement and defied God’s plan.  I’d try to force what I knew in my heart was not my moment…and by trying to “bloom” too soon, I ruined the whole thing.The price I paid for popping up and out too soon sometimes was high. Other times, not so much. But each time I missed the proud-of-me smile of God. And that irreplaceable, indescribeable feeling that He and I had done something together.

 

But heck, I don’t want to be a little ole daffodil anyway. I want to be a gorgeous aromatic Lily. A “Stargazer”. They’re pale pink with darker pink stripes or dots in their throat. They smell so heavenly, I can’t walk into Whole Foods without stopping first to take one long glorious whiff of  them where they sit in the floral department outshining every other bloom. I was so intent on this little happy ritual, that one day I leaned in a little too enthusiastically, and fell into the lovely display….but that’s another story. These flowers are so gorgeous that they would make someone literally “fall for them”.  They  are laboriously tended while they grow in perfectly climate regulated greenhouses. They’re carefully cut so that they might adorn the table or delight the lady of the house. They know their place. They don’t decide when to pop out of the ground. They wait for the hand of the ardent, wise gardener. 

  And, Mr. Ten Days, if you’re reading this, a bouquet of them sure would make this former daffodil mighty happy.