“Grow the roses - those rosy roses; from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.”
That line is sung by a group of cheery old men in the famous movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” These men, kept as prisoners, were told to build a flying car, and after years of effort, they failed countless times. But when we, the viewers, enter the scene, these old men start singing as they begin again.
Even as a child, the song captured me. But as an adult, I appreciate these lyrics in ways I never did before; “growing from ashes,” so to speak, can be downright crushing when those ashes stand in the place that once belonged to a beautiful patch of goodness met by disaster. I can picture the Mediterranean cities of ancient times being conquered by fire and sword as blades and torches sweep mercilessly into the beautiful cities of marble and ivy and roses that were cultivated by the hopeful inhabitants of the land.
What heart-wrenching disaster. And yet, over 2,000 years later, the cities’ new inhabitants have cultivated roses once again, and now their gardens and hills abound in flowering life.
The world we live in could qualify as a disaster, in a way… in the very beginning, mankind wreaked havoc on all that was good and green and beautiful that grew from God’s cultivating hand. But bringing beauty out of ashes seemed to be a part of God’s plan. And in the beautiful narrative of biology, plants that grow from the soil of ashes will often grow greener and fuller than before.
So how do we, as cultivators of God’s good green earth, restore beauty to the land and repair what we selfishly devastated those many years ago? I believe that to cultivate a life of beauty in the midst of a world we waged war on, we need to look at the conditions in which beauty needs to thrive - the ways in which we can foster an environment for it to flourish. And that takes work and effort. But to grow the roses we need to prepare their soil. Likewise, to cultivate places of beauty once again means we must encourage those every day moments of grace and goodness and truth to enter our lives.
Living faithfully day by day, attending to the overlooked, and breathing in God’s truth from His sacred words are ways to cultivate the beautiful life He intended for us at the beginning. Easier said than done, of course! These things take a lifetime to navigate, but at least we have a starting place; we have the ashes – greener things will grow again. We just need to cultivate them. And with God’s help, “from the ashes of disaster, [we’ll] grow the roses of success.”
