Grow where you are put

We spend a large quantum of our thoughts and efforts contemplating places that we would like to be, places we wished we could be in, places that we have been in the past. How much time and effort do we spend on  the place we are in now?

“Lillies grow where they are put.” This statement from Oswald Chambers is profoundly simple.  Lillies have been held up as an example to us about the provision available in all of nature, a lovely reminder that the world does go around, despite us. Our whirlwind lives often zip right by this wayside parable. And in our race to move on, get ahead, go places, the quiet beauty of a flower growing where it is put holds out a meaning that we might just miss.

How can we grow where we are put?  Just as provision exists for the growth of that flower, our current circumstances have been provided for. This truth holds, even if our current circumstances are difficult, dangerous, or excruciatingly painful.  Those circumstances might even be desperately boring or seemingly unfulfilling.  Flower petals bedecked with dew should remind us that provision permeates the gaps.

Every day awakens the potential to grow, to read, to remember, to consciously develop  ourselves. Resources exist all around even in seemingly desperate situations.  The internet is a huge resource, readily available. People all around us possess wisdom and experience untapped and unrecognized.  That which is in our hands can hold out hope for others.

I remind myself of an graphic incident from my posting in Jadaghri mission hospital. The hospital was about to close. One hundred beds lay empty, with the water and electricity bills not paid.  For a whole month of my posting there was no work. One day, a patient was brought with head injury, seizing, despite every intervention to control the convulsions. Advice to transfer the patient to a higher centre in Chandigarh was met with despair and blank looks from the relatives who were not able to afford the cost of transfer.  The patient would need a surgery. There was no anesthetist, no neurosurgical tools to operate.  A search of the hospital yielded one metal screwdriver and a metal hammer in the maintenance department. I asked the nurse to autoclave these and calling in an anesthetist from another town, made holes in the skull to relieve the pressure. The convulsions stopped. Even a hammer and a screwdriver can become crude  implements that save life.  This story is a reminder to me never to give up. Never give in.  Search for what is available locally and use it. Grow.