Graceful Sunflowers

My interest in grace and the law began this blog.  I hope that it continues to drive it into the future.  While I have spent more of my life these past few months in a garden, I also spend time teaching my blended English courses and find that the balance of technology and nature is quite like the law and grace.

It seems that everything can be used against other people in every way possible.  Technology is meant to aid our lives.  It is meant to be assistive and not master.  It is meant to empower and not enslave.  The law is meant to do the same.  The law is meant to empower and not enslave as well; it is to be balanced with grace.

Grace is just given.  Whether we ask for it or not, grace is there.  God gives more to us than any of us will ever be able to say or understand whether or not be know it or care.  Grace is grace.  It is because of the contract that God has written on all of our hearts to belong as a part of creation in balance with creation that we know the law without even studying it.  It is through studying the law that we understand how much grace we have.

God Shine on Us.  It seems that we need the light of God more than anything else in the world that we live in.  It is such and because we need the light of God that I love Son-Flowers.  I think sunflowers are beautiful; they are a balance of masculine and feminine while unapologetic for being so.  They are as God intended.  Strong, beautiful, bountiful, and lovely in the sun.

Sunflowers grow quickly and slowly.  Mine have been growing for a few months now.  They are waist high.  I have noticed that my favorite sunflower in the garden follows the sun.  In the morning, the head of the sunflower in flat towards the sky.  By the end of the day, it nearly directly faces the sunset.  It follows the sun all day and begins again in the morning.

Sister Sunflower teaches us to follow the light; Brother Sunflower teaches us to praise upright towards the stars.  How graceful the sunflowers are as they look always to the light!  Even when they are not in bloom, they know to follow.  They are created to do so just as we are.  It is written inside of them as their own contract with God.  Their covenant is to teach us all to stand tall, take nourishment in the light, and feed God's creation in the harvest.

While it is forming a bloom, I may move.  I don't know how far away the bloom is from showing how God has created my sunflower to shine.  It is the sharp edge of the law to move before the harvest.  Grace will come to my garden and my life when I do again.  I will have peace once more.

When I think of the song, All Creatures of Our God and King, I think about plants.  Plants grow like animals, yet we don't think of them as necessarily a part of us.  Mine have become a part me just as much as my beloved schnauzer, Rumi, and cat, Lyric.

In a duet, both musicians accompany one another.  Rumi and Lyric, grace and the law, and technology and nature have to balance one another and have one another to fully thrive.  There is no real soloist except the light.