This spring I have tried sprucing up the front yard a bit. I pulled weeds and trimmed bushes. I planted a rose bush and some friendly looking little blue flowers to welcome me home each day.
The roses, the little flowers, and the not so well trimmed bushes are lovely, but the plant that captures my heart is the tree that lives in the corner of my front yard close to the street. I don't know what kind of tree it is. I just call it the heart tree. It branches out wide, but not tall. In the early spring it has sweet little pinkish purple buds. Later the buds are replaced with pods that remind me of peas. The pods, newly fallen, spring up quickly filling my yard with seedlings. Everywhere the pods fall, little heart shaped sprouts grow. Then, finally, the blooms and pods disappear altogether to give way to hand-sized heart-shaped leaves, full and verdant.
The heart tree has turned into a prayer. A prayer that love would grow in my home. That it would flourish like a tree by streams of water. That my home would be a place of shade and joy and comfort and rest. That whoever enters would feel loved and be filled with love to give others.
Father, let the love of Christ grow here.
Love that glowed from it like firelight from its windows at night.
- On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, Andrew Peterson
