Snowdrop Discipleship

I can’t say I’m right, but here it is.

My mom has always grown snowdrops. They are my favorite flower. They are the first flower to bloom in spring, and are closely followed by crocus. Spring has always been my favorite time of year. I don't remember why I liked it when I was young, but now I like it for the weather. You may think of spring as calm and peaceful with flowers pushing up through the dirt to a chorus of birds and violins. But that is not the weather you will find here. Here you will find snow in the morning, thunderstorms at noon, rain and hail at tea time, and sunshine at every interval. People call it bipolar. People say it can’t make up its mind. I fall in love every time.

But this is not about spring. Or maybe it is, but in a roundabout way. This is about discipleship. This is about snowdrops.

My mom has always had snowdrops, and they have been my favorite flowers for as long as I remember, with only crocus to compete. When we moved to our country home, I took over the underexplored wooded areas and claimed them as my own secret gardens. They had brush and fallen trees and, well, let’s just say there were a few smuggled snowdrops.

I took only a few at a time, maybe two or three bulbs, from my mom’s cluster of snowdrops. You see, bulbs multiply, so if you take one and leave one, pretty soon you will have two clusters of your favorite flower. I left plenty. I took several. I took them and planted them and waited a few years to watch them multiply and then thinned them out and waited some more.

A few weeks ago I visited my secret garden to find all the snowdrops blooming. Clusters filled my secret space, and there were more snowdrops than I remembered planting. When I went back to the house, I saw mom’s snowdrops. I must say, it was a sad sight. It was a small cluster. It was a ragged bunch. It was few, though they were not far between.

Later I thought about discipleship, and the tower of Babel. I thought about how we stay in our churches and complain about how no one is doing anything, and we make Christian friends and hang out with our Christian friends and have fun with our Christian friends.

But when you send one person away, say to a Muslim country, you find he has learned the language and made friends and those friends have decided to follow Jesus and have told their friends and family and they are having the first worship service in that language for who knows how long. You find when you break Christians up, they make more Christians. You find when you leave Christians together, you have about the same number of Christians. Sure, the Christians have babies and make new Christians out of them, but it’s nothing like separating the Christians and watching the Holy Spirit work.

And then I thought about the tower of Babel and church denominations. I wondered if we tend to band together, ignoring the Great Commission. We say, “Let us stay here and make a name for ourselves.” We forget Jesus commanded us to go to uncomfortable places and make His name famous. So Jesus comes down and changes our languages and we go our separate ways over tiny lines of doctrine and preference.

There it is, though I can't say I'm right.

Things to pray for:

Peace and efficiency as I enter graduation season. There is a lot of work to do.

Wisdom and peace to handle conflict well and to recover from stressful situations well.

Wisdom and guidance as I lead huddle, that I would be able to hear the heart of the girls in my huddle and would be able to point them to Jesus in healing ways.

I talked to a friend in East Asia the other day and now I'm not sure what I'm doing with my life, if I need to leave the country. I think I've forgotten my dreams from years ago and have traded them in for the American dream. But comfort is not a very interesting dream.

Wisdom and grace to be in the world and not of it.

Probably I could just use a lot of wisdom.