ROSES

The ice cream parlor is new. The street is old...even to me.

A few days ago, my young daughter and I stopped for an ice cream cone at a new Baskin-Robbins. The store was located on a street that I have known since high school. For nearly eight years I was Music Minister for a church a half-mile up the road. When I was in high school I occasionally sang as a guest in the youth choir of a buddy’s church across the street. The building for his church was constructed at least 75 years ago. It has a cemetery around it filled with the granite headstones that were once a tradition in (then) rural Gwinnett County, Georgia.

Things change over the years. The old strip center where our church staff often went for lunch is now a new Walmart. The ice cream parlor is where the bank and dry cleaners once stood. Most of the signs and words all around now are in Spanish. I am sure the pleasant young lady scooping the ice cream relied more on my pointing fingers than on my English request for “...two chocolate cones, one scoop each.”

As dad and daughter sat down to eat our ice cream, I glanced across the street to the old church (now converted to a school) and to the cemetery beyond.

I was too far away to see the features of his face. I could not tell his age for certain, but I would have guessed at least 80. He wore casual trousers held in place by suspenders along with a solid colored dress shirt. It looked liked it had been ironed by someone who was not accustomed to ironing every day. He carried in his hands a long box and one of those small hand-held clippers that you might use on house plants. His car was a mid-1980s white Oldsmobile sedan. Though it showed normal wear, it look well-cared for. The whitewall tires looked to have been recently cleaned.

With ambling but steady steps he made his way about 20 feet from his car to one of the granite headstones. He laid the box and his clippers on the ground while he cleared the contents out of a vase that was built into the granite marker. Then, one at a time, he took a rose out of the box, trimmed it and placed it lovingly in the vase. He reached into the box once again for some baby’s breath that he carefully arranged around the vase of roses. When he was done arranging, he produced a small watering can and slowly filled the vase with water.

Had he been 18 instead of 80, and had the vase been made of glass rather than stone, I would have believed his flowers to be for a prom date instead of the mission they served in a Georgia cemetery.

When he finished his work, he knelt in prayer for a few seconds. As he got up, he brushed the edge of the headstone a few times and gazed at its words. I couldn’t help but imagine that he brushed the sand off the cold, stone slab with same gentle motion that he must have once brushed his wife’s hair from her forehead. As he stood, he leaned forward to gently touch his lips to the edge of the granite headstone.

As I watched him amble to his car, my daughter’s musical voice brought me back from my trance. “Daddy, what are you looking at?” The little face asking the question looked like a clown with a two inch border of chocolate ice cream (yes, nose included) around the mouth.

“I am watching love, honey. I am watching God’s will at work.” “I don’t understand, Daddy.” “I can’t explain it, sweetheart, but you will know it one day when you see it.”

I will never know the elderly man’s name, but I will never forget his witness. I just hope and pray that one day, when my precocious little girl becomes a wondrous young woman, someone comes into her life to adore her in the way that this loving man treasures the partner that waits for him at God’s banquet table.

I also hope and pray that God teaches me to love likewise.

“Faith, hope and love...endure all things...but the greatest of these is love.”

Soli Deo Gloria,
Bill