02.27.2026 | Friday in Lent

​Grace and Orchids
 
The house is still a construction zone, and I’ve spent the week tucked into the garden corner of the cellar, wrestling with crumbling stonework. It’s dirty, dusty, discouraging work — the kind that makes an old gardener mutter under his breath. I know I can be a bit prickly when the tasks are ones I’d rather avoid.
 
With that in mind, Dr. B, in her inimitable way, decided we were going to take a fun trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden to see the Orchid Show. Orchids? Why yes, thank you. A tiny bit of beauty and grace on a late afternoon in February.
 
Orchids are fussy, fragile, and astonishingly beautiful. Their fragrance greets you before you even enter the greenhouse, and once inside, the world shifts: color, light, and delicate blooms everywhere you turn. It felt like walking into a parable about grace.
 
Grace is what I received yesterday. Grace, unearned. Grace, undeserved. Grace from a loving spouse on a sunny afternoon.
 
On this Friday in Lent, I’m thinking a lot about grace, the truth that there is absolutely nothing we can do to make our Creator love us more. And nothing we can do to make our Creator love us less. We are loved beyond measure, beyond comprehension, beyond anything we can imagine. We are loved. I need that reminder sometimes.
 
But yesterday, surrounded by orchids, I remembered. I am loved by a partner who knows when I need beauty. I am loved by a Creator who loves me, even when I’m grumbling in the basement. The things flowers can teach us. Grace and orchids.