Springtime In An Unlikely Place

I’ve been seeing these little clouds of flowering white trees popping out all over the woods this week, and I’d been planning a hike out to where they’re blooming far across the field near our home—but then I spotted this lovely vignette of white tree trunks and blossoms while I was out driving, just exactly what I was looking for, and I swung in to snap some pictures. At the dump.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? I thought I would take my photos of gorgeous pure white blossoms out along the edge of a beautiful wide open field, to the gentle music of the creek flowing past nearby. Instead I stood behind the peeling paint of a sign that detailed accepted and unaccepted waste for this facility, only a few feet from mountains of filthy garbage, listening to a different creak—that of the metal entrance gate in the wind.

There’s a little picture of something really big here, you know.

We’d all like to imagine our selves and our lives as idyllic and pristine as that pastoral scene I had in mind. Lovely. Serene. Peaceful. Picturesque. In reality, though, we’re all a lot more like that dirty garbage dump. Stinking, ugly sinners with messed up hearts and lives. Not pretty at all.

But—

God can take the filthiest, ugliest waste of a life, wash it whiter than petals on those blossoms, and make it burst forth into life and beauty far beyond anything that I could ever capture with my camera.