The bluebonnets are blooming this week. The roadsides are thick with them. I felt compelled to get Little One out in them to take his picture. Normally, I would have been hesitant (to say the least) to let my three-year-old frolic beside a busy road, but the blue beauty so captivated us that we hardly noticed the cars zipping by. That is what flowers do to me. They fill me with a sense of God’s presence . . . a sense of well being.

In honor of this Texas wildflower, I read Tomie dePaola’s version of The Legend of the Bluebonnet to my toddler. He was so worried about the little girl’s doll. “Is she going to hurt it?” he kept asking. In the story, the Comanche people’s selfishness has caused a drought and famine. The shaman says they must sacrifice their most precious possession to make the rain fall again. The little girl knows that possession is her beloved doll with the blue feathers in his hair—the only thing she has left from the days her parents were alive. She bravely gives him up to the fire and scatters his ashes.

Unexpected beauty and wonder surround the little girl when she awakes the next morning. Everywhere the doll’s ashes fell is covered in a blanket of bluebonnets.

The sadness of loss turns into the surprise and joy of a different gift, even better than the first, for the magnificence of the doll’s feathers has multiplied a million fold! The little girl gave up her doll to gain rain, the love of her people, and blue flowers in spring ever after.

I am intrigued by the concept of the pain of sacrifice opening the door to unimaginable joy. Next week is Easter, and I can’t help but think of the sadness of Jesus’s death—God’s sacrifice of the most Precious. He suffered to wash us clean so that we might live with Him in perfection for eternity. The heart-wrenching sadness in the garden of Gethsemane, the cries of Mary and the disciples . . . all the despair rolled away with the stone. And a miracle, something human minds couldn’t fathom, filled up all the darkness with light and hope and more joy than ever. Jesus is alive! Not as one man who ministers to people in one part of the world, but as God who ministers to each of us who believes in Him no matter where we are.

Dear Lord, please help me not to hold on too tightly to familiarity, possessions, or my limited human perceptions, but to give all to You . . . the One “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. . . .” (Ephesians 3:20)

“. . . [W]hoever loses his life for Me and for the gospel will find it.”  Mark 8:35

“ . . . I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  John 10:10