I have a favorite shrub. Most of the time, it looks plain and leggy and boring and colorless, but it isn’t. I know, because for a few weeks every spring I see its beauty bursts out. It dresses up in its party clothes--small, salmon blossoms that give me joy. So, when I see it looking plain and leggy and boring and colorless during its off-season, I just smile and say, “That’s okay. I know better.”
“I suppose . . . Rose’s husband seems to you just an ordinary, good-natured, middle-aged man. . . . Just a rather red, rather round man. . . . He isn’t. . . . Rose sees through all that. That’s mere trimmings. She sees what we can’t see, because she loves him.” Elizabeth Von Armin, Enchanted April
“[L]ove one another.” John 15:12
Father, today I accept your kind invitation to see through people’s mere trimmings.