Why I Take Pictures of Flowers

Hi Friends,

In case you're wondering why I'm always taking those flower pictures wherever I go, well, here's the answer:

Flowers, Flowers Everywhere!

There is a common beauty found all over the world. A splash of color, a hint of sweet scent. Familiar, and foreign. Like home and a half a world away.

I discovered this beauty on a narrow street in a small country town in the hills of France. My older daughters and I had travelled to France with their school group, and now we walked cobbled streets surrounded by stone buildings older than anything we could find in the United States.

Halfway down a street, across from a cathedral, I saw it. Simple, really. A short pot filled with bright red tulips. 

I stopped, grabbed my phone, and took a picture.

My eldest daughter paused in front of me and frowned. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a picture of these flowers to send to Jayden.”

She huffed. “That’s dumb. Take a picture of the cathedral instead.”

I shrugged. It may have been dumb, but I did it anyway. My son, Jayden, seven at the time, loved flowers. When he was little he called them “fowlers” and would always gather me a bunch when the wildflowers bloomed on our property in the spring. When we went to parks, he stopped to appreciate all the pretty petals. When we went to the store, he would want to pick the flowers in the pots outside. Of course I didn’t let him, but he could smell them and touch them and fill his soul with their beauty, 

So it only made sense now to text him pictures of France’s flowers so he would know I was thinking about him. 

I took another picture of the tulips. Then I snapped pictures of the bright yellow daffodils at the park a little ways down the street. I took pictures of tiny purple wildflowers across from the statue of Denis Diderot in Langres, climbing lavender wisteria at the Château de Chenonceau, cherry blossoms in Paris, and tiny little white flowers that looked like daisies on the walk to Napoleon’s tomb. 

I took pictures of flowers everywhere. Yellows, oranges, purples, pinks, and blues. As lovely as the paintings in the Louvre. After all, they were flowers in France!

Then I came home. But I kept seeing flowers, splashes of beauty in the most mundane places. In a pot outside the supermarket. Poking up in a crack in the parking lot of an apartment complex. Alongside the sidewalk, growing wild, on the way to my favorite restaurant. At home, among the weeds, yellow flowers. 

            So I’ve continued to take pictures. My daughters laugh at me still. They think it’s silly. Maybe it is. 

But the flowers remind me of God’s grace. They remind me of his wonder. They pop up in the places I least expect. They give beauty in the places that seem too mundane to notice.

I want to notice. I want to be intentional, intentional enough to take a picture, to remember, not just the flowers but the ways in which God reveals his beauty, his glory, his wonder in all the unexpected and ordinary places in my life. I want to see him as I rush into the grocery store, as I walk to my favorite restaurant, as I hurry through the apartment complex parking lot to set up a party for the low-income kids there. I even want to see him, glory in him, at home when life seems full of the weeds of weariness, discouragement, and everyday hurry. I want to see him there most of all.

Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV) says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ALL your heart. All my heart and with everything I am. Not just when I’m having an amazing vacation halfway across the world, but when I’m home and tired and just don’t want to bother. To seek him then. To see him.

I love the flowers of France. And lately, I’ve come to love the flowers in my local Prunetree shopping center too. There is common beauty found all over the world, waiting to be discovered in the most overlooked places of life. There is a beauty that points to the breath-taking wonder of a God who will be found by us if only we pause to seek him, to see, and to breath deeply of his grace in the most unimpressive places of our lives.

So I think I will keep taking pictures of flowers in everyday places … no matter how often my daughters sigh and shake their heads. Because in doing so, I might just see God.