Much To Hope

We have a rose bush that has been with us for the past five years. When we moved into “our” house in Bunia (the house we loved and lived in for most of our time there), we inherited a rose bush from the previous MAF family. I had a lot of fun clipping roses to take inside and put in a vase for Kathleen. The best was when I managed to get them into a vase and on the shelf without her knowing I was doing it. The rose bush served us well this morning by producing three roses for Mother’s Day.

January last year, we moved to a different house in Bunia. The rose bush moved with us. It was the dry season, so we tried to keep the plant well-watered. But after a few weeks in the ground at the new house, all we had were dry, brown branches and we thought that maybe we had killed our rose bush. It was an exciting day when we saw new green growth on the bush!

A couple of weeks after returning to Congo and moving to Nyankunde, I went to our old house in Bunia and brought the rose bush home. We found a nice place for it at the corner of our front porch. It handled the move very well. Two weeks ago it started blooming, and it has been pushing out roses like there is no tomorrow.

Our rose bush reminded me of my favorite quote from that great theologian…Sherlock Holmes. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, “The Naval Treaty,” Sherlock Holmes states:

“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Much to hope indeed.