Encouragement is not easily come by these days. So many things seem aimed at causing discouragement, frustration, and despair. It’s easy to get distracted… easy to lose one’s way… easy to lash out in anger. I want to resist what is easy. I want to resist the temptation to scapegoat and look for simple answers in a complex world.

I look at this image of  a flower growing in a most unlikely place. I found it embedded in a cleft of shale rock, along the coast of an area of RI known as Beavertail. I found life growing in a hard, unforgiving place; beauty in the midst of dull, gray rock. It gives me hope. Hope that God’s gift of life can thrive in the most unlikely of places. Hope that I can thrive even in life’s most difficult places. Because of God’s grace.

It took the brokeness of the rock to allow space for God’s beauty to flourish. Perhaps the brokeness of my hard heart can also be space for God’s grace to flourish.

D~