I anticipate with excitement a certain day of the year, every year.  I can’t tell you what day it is, though, because I don’t actually know.  To be more specific, I don’t ever know the exact date until the day it happens but the event that I anticipate, that I can tell you,  I love the day my peony opens!  Or peony, depending on how you pronounce it.

That day also happens to be a day I dread, because it rains that day and beats down my beautiful peony blooms, light pink, double blooms as big as my hand on tiny little stalks.  It rains that day. Every. Year.

This year the gloriously painful day was June 15th.  I know the exact date because I took pictures of the bloom.  It was sunny in the morning when I awoke to several massive blooms that had popped open overnight – but by 11:30 a.m. the sky had turned cloudy.  I decided to take a picture so I could enjoy their beauty longer, knowing they would only survive a day or so. 

As I squatted in the dirt so my camera was even with a bloom, thunder clapped somewhere in the distance. 

Seriously, I’m not making that up.

Within 20 minutes, the sky had started to release a light rain.  I decided to record that too, taking video of the rain softly falling on the flower and a very happy bird chirping in the background.

One hour after that, it was pouring and we had a full-on thunderstorm.  I went outside and squatted in the dirt during that too.  With a rain jacket over my head, I filmed one more time my poor bloom being battered by the storm…and at that exact moment thunder boomed over me. 

Four hours after taking the first picture, the storm had passed, and the peony blooms no longer looked straight at me but drooped toward the ground on bent and damaged stalks.

The event I anticipate all year lasted less than a day.

That same week, I realized it was almost two years since I started Come So Alive.  “As I come so alive”…those words had felt so true two years earlier.  But in June of this year, I had a hard time feeling it.  I own a necklace with those lyrics written in my handwriting, which I wear as my armor.  Except I had been too resentful recently to wear the necklace many days. Too tired to be bothered with jewelry (which is a really lame excuse because it’s on a long chain so all I have to do is slip it over my head).

Also during that time, I was reading a book called Lightning Strike (ahh, the irony).  The main character, Cork, comes upon his priest crying and asking God, “Why me?”  When he sees Cork, he explains how much heaviness he carries for his parishioners and it feels too much for him.  He doesn’t understand why this is his call.

First, I felt a stab as that question resonated.  How many times have I asked “Why…”?  Then I thought of my peony and that a flower doesn’t ask that question. It doesn’t resent opening up every spring, knowing a storm is coming.  It just does what it was created to do.  It comes alive year after year.  For however long it has and no matter how hard the rain will be. 

“Sometimes I wish things would never change,” [Cork said.]

“That is like trying to stop the dawn,” Meloux said.  “Better, I think, to open yourself to what each new day offers.”

“What if it offers only pain, Henry?” Cork’s father said.

“In my experience, pain is never the only offering.  What we receive depends on what we open our hearts to.”

William Kent Krueger, Lightning Strike

I wonder if my peony is already looking forward to June. Knowing that the way it looked after the storm this year is not the way it will stay. No matter the pain that may also come next year, anticipating coming alive yet again and showing the world all its glory, all God’s glory, for one, wonderful day. 

Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Howard Thurman