Our garden grew a few weeds, which always ended up in the hand of my mother. She was inveterate green thumb of our family, with a pronounced proclivity for raising the rarest of flowers which grace bouquets and the vases of the powerful, blue and white orchids. With a steady eye and an unending labor, she would tend the ground around her bed of buds and blossoms of crocuses, roses, common daisies, and much less accessible orchids.

My dad used to wander up roads in the mountains of Peru every time our boy's group would take camping trips into the Andes. On the sides of the wet and dripping cliffs of the foothills, single flowers would cling to a crack in the dark red or black rock.

Somehow withstanding the winds, pouring rains, soaking up the few hours of sun which penetrated the steep tracts of broken hillsides, these unlikely growths would protrude from the granite and dirt where the only slice of gravel and mud highway could cross the 1000 foot deep cataracts as it wound its way from Pucallpa to Lima. There on the ragged, broken surface would grow the various shaded and artistic creations of God, white and occasionally blue blossoms of feathery orchids.

Orchids are so vaunted and desirable a flower, that thousands of the powerful, corporations, and high ranking leaders pay large sums to have their tables and corporate gardens populated with these natural denizens of the jungle. Orchids don't grow in clusters unless bred and tended that way. The greenhouse versions are easier to procure, but not nearly as desirable as the single cousins which open their tender petals to the unfriendly skies and some sliver of a serendipitous growth. But they naturally appear, one in miles of bare and broken cliffs, a side of dark rock rising hundreds of feet into a cloudy confluence of moisture, so necessary for the blossom, but on many days of the year, enduring the rains swept down the canyons of that snow capped range, with accompanying floods and high winds.

The crags of the Andes are beautiful, climbing into the raspy and scarce oxygen of the South American continent, while in this rough, distinctly unfriendly environment, some of the rarest plants on earth, amid the tearing winds, orchids somehow thrive, tender, fragile, excruciatingly magnetic! And my mom cultivated every one which my dad would fold in wet layers of paper or rag towels to give her from his travels. The whole plant, which he carefully pulled, roots and all, from the steep mountainsides.

Orchids are some of the prettiest flowers on the planet, but suffer storms, earthquakes, and raging rivers to reach their fragile faces to the narrow window of broken blue in which they struggle and mature. One of God's examples of suffering to produce magnificence!

Lord, may we see the suffering through which we travel, sometimes slogging painfully, to arrive as a blossom, fit for a Kings table on the other side!