Lesson from the Bouganvilla

"Bougainvillea is a genus of flowering plants native to South America from Brazil west to Peru and south to southern Argentina (Chubut Province). Different authors accept between four and 18 species in the genus. The name comes from Louis Antoine de Bougainville, an admiral in the French Navy who encountered the plant in Brazil in 1768 and first described it to Europeans.

They are thorny, woody, vines growing anywhere from 1-12 meters tall, scrambling over other plants with their hooked thorns. The thorns are tipped with a black, waxy substance that is easily left in the flesh of an unsuspecting victim. They are evergreen where rainfall occurs all year, or deciduous if there is a dry season. The leaves are alternate, simple ovate-acuminate, 4-13 cm long and 2-6 cm broad. The actual flower of the plant is small and generally white, but each cluster of three flowers is surrounded by three or six bracts with the bright colors associated with the plant, including pink, magenta, purple, red, orange, white, or yellow. Bougainvillea glabra is sometimes referred to as "paper flower" because the bracts are thin and papery. The fruit is a narrow five-lobed achene." Thank you, Wikipedia.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day about bouganvilla. Now, I don't know how much you know about bouganvilla, but here in southern California, as well as in some parts of Arizona where I grew up, bouganvilla is quite common.

When watered frequently, bouganvilla plants are a mass of lush green foliage, with tiny white flowers in some places. They grow happily and are very lovely. But they're pretty much all green.

But when you withhold water from them, only watering rarely, they become stressed a little. And from this stress, they produce beautiful, stunning, colored foliage. Most common is pink or purple, but there is also orange, red, and white.

Now, I don't know what you're thinking right now, but when I heard that, the first thing I thought of was the spiritual lesson from that. Sure, we can turn into lush, lovely green plants when everything's going great...but it's when we're stressed a little, when we have problems and we turn to the Lord and trust Him for everything, that we become more beautiful than we could ever have imagined. And the world sees our beauty, and they wonder how we became so gorgeous. Which gives us an opportunity to share how the Master Gardener tested us and tried us and stressed us to bring out the beauty that comes only from dependence and trust in Him.