“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” – Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Consider some unseen “flowers” who did not waste their sweetness:
— Neerja Bhanot, a flight attendant who was murdered while saving passengers from terrorists on board the hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 in September of 1986. Posthumously, she became the youngest recipient of India’s highest civilian award for bravery.
— Lee Jong-rak, a minister in South Korea who created a “baby box.” He attached the box to the side of his house, allowing parents to deposit their mentally handicapped or unwanted babies, to stop them from being abandoned on the side of the road.
— Megan Coffee, a specialist in infectious diseases who has been working in Haiti since the earthquake in 2010. She established a new sanatorium at that time and still works there, without pay, taking public transportation to get around.
— Scott Neeson, the former head of 20th Century Fox International who left Hollywood to save children scavenging in Cambodia’s garbage dumps. He sold his mansion, Porsche, and yacht to care for destitute children.
— Irena Sendler, a woman who grew up in Nazi-occupied Poland who risked her life to save 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto from 1942 to 1943.
Before reading about these unsung heroes just yesterday, I had never heard of them. I’m guessing the same is true for you. The Bible is also full of flowers who did not waste their sweetness, of relatively unknown people who did great things for God. Or, more accurately, God did great things through them. For example, beginning in Genesis chapter 37, we read about Joseph the shepherd boy—sold off by his brothers, falsely accused, left to languish in prison, forgotten by both time and family, and wasting away in utter and complete obscurity—to find himself eventually elevated to the second-highest position in the land.
But that’s who God is and what He does to accomplish His purposes. He takes a flower that seems to blush unseen and waste its sweetness, at least according to the standards of this world, and gives it a meaning and influence that impacts others, even saves lives.
God did this very thing with His Son, Jesus. As we read about our Savior in Isaiah 53:2b-3, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” And yet the life, death, and resurrection of this seemingly ordinary man, this flower, this unsung hero, changed this world forever and made heaven and eternal life a reality for all who believe in Him.
Troy Burns