Thankful: For Endurance

Weeping may last through the night,

but joy comes with the morning.

Psalm 30:50

Two nights ago my gluten intolerance combined with my food allergies to cause a stomach meltdown.  I was up most of the night throwing up, and I have not felt particularly well ever since.  It usually takes me a few days to get back to normal when I have one of these attacks.  I get smarter and smarter about avoiding stomach problems, but they still happen more frequently than I would like. During my recovery, I have thought alot about endurance.  Funny topic?  Perhaps, but it takes a fair amount of endurance to get through a night of stomach sickness, and there was more than once the other evening when I felt like rolling into a ball and just giving up.

Late last fall, I was doing some final gardening in the back yard, and decided to dig out the stump of an old plant in the area around my pecan tree.  I grabbed a shovel and dug around the roots until the stump finally pulled free.  There appeared to be something white and glistening down in the bottom of the hole.  I worked on it for a minute with my trowel, and up popped a bulb.  As I scratched away at the area, carefully moving dirt, I found a huge mound of bulbs, all crunched together in a round ball, at least a foot deep in the dirt around the pecan tree.  How long they had been there, I do not know.  They had never bloomed - of that I am certain.  I removed all of them, put them in a large plastic nursery pot, then set them by the back door.

Two months later, I happened upon the pot of bulbs, and set them by the front door, figuring that I would see them there and do something with them.  Finally, around the first of December, I took advantage of a slightly warmer day to plant the bulbs in brick planter that skirts the front of my house.  I poked them in the dirt, watered them a little, then forgot about them completely. I did not have much hope that anything would come of them.  After all, they had been buried far below ground for a long time.  I don't know what kind of shelf life flower bulbs have, but I told myself that if they didn't bloom, I was only out a small bit of effort.

This morning, I was on my way to throw out some trash when I happened to glance at the flower bed and stopped in my tracks.  Bright green shoots - obviously daffodils - are coming up in wavery rows (just like I haphazardly planted them) from back to front, side to side - a veritable plethora of green shoots.  It is a little early here for daffodils to come up, but they are hardy, resiliant little buggers - flowers that know how to endure until they are able to burst forth and shine.  They will provide a wonderful mental reminder for me whenever my endurance begins to falter.