~Thankful for 'thorns'~

In May when we were in Portland for Ayla's eye
surgery, we took an afternoon and walked through
the beautiful Rose Gardens and the Japanese Gardens. They were gorgeous and almost didn't seem real....it was a drizzly afternoon but did not dampen the obvious beauty.











Although we were not in season to see the roses in bloom through the Rose Garden, it was nonetheless serene; we could clearly see the thorns on the stems.

A few months before Ayla and Zoey were born I heard a song on the radio which spoke of roses, their beauty and their thorns. The lyrics went something along the lines of, "Are you thankful for the thorns?" It was walking through that bloomless rose garden that those lyrics floated through my mind....and I understood what it meant.

Roses are beautiful and delicate..... and they have sharp thorns. Did I appreciate the beauty of the rose along with the beauty of the thorns? I hadn't really thought about the metaphor of the song until then.

To accept the rose one must also accept the thorns that are part of it.

Life is beautiful and has it's 'thorns' too.... for that I am grateful. I suppose it was one of those 'aha' moments when God was teaching me that there is beauty in every situation and in which the 'thorns' have their season too.