“I can take it down now,” he said with the chainsaw in his hand, “or you can let the wind do it, in which case, it’ll probably end up on your house!”

The tree in question was a beautiful maple which was packed full of eighteen years of fond memories of my children playing in and around it. It also was the main source of shade for our patio. However, its trunk was splitting down the middle and a huge limb hung precariously over the house. As much as I hated it, I told him to cut it down. In just a few hours it was reduced to a pile of sawdust.

The next summer we received a pleasant surprise. Bathed in a daylong sunlight, the plants in my pond grew profusely, producing a variety of stunning, colorful blossoms. In the spring, I had set adrift on the pond five small water hyacinths. By midsummer, they were a hundred or more strong. I had to remove some or they would have taken over the entire pond. Last year, I couldn’t get them to grow in the shade. This year, I was carrying baskets full of them to my compost pile.

One day as I picked up a basket full of discarded water hyacinths, I noticed something which caused me to consider more than fish ponds, sunlight and prolific water plants. There in the basket a plant had blossomed. Its last dying act was to create beautiful lavender blossoms, one last reminder of its days in the sun, one last attempt to blossom so that other plants might be pollinated and live.

Seeing that lovely blossom from a dying hyacinth, I thought of Nicaragua and one of our trips there. CONSIDER, in a way, that the Nicaraguan people have been heaped into a gigantic basket, marked “discards.” Wars, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes have brought such disaster upon the people and their land. At first glance they resemble a basket of things dying, whose only destiny is the trash heap. And yet, when I travel there and look past all the decay and dying, I see blossoms, popping up in the most unusual places.

There may be a physical poverty in Nicaragua but there certainly is not poverty on the spirit.

Rev. Wendell Mettey
10/1999
Revised 7/08/2014

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