Flowers are the central theme in a childhood dream that hasn’t let up. I might as well just go ahead and say it plainly. Trying to find a clever way to put it won’t save me any embarrassment.

I’ve always wanted a home where flowers spill out everywhere: window boxes, pots, landscaping, and by the front door. Everything is a tidy abundance—colorful and lush. Tulips, roses, chrysanthemums, blueberries, impatiens, hollyhocks…. Any of it, all of it, and a lot of it.

The flowers are an allusion to what is found inside the home, you could say. It says, God’s handiwork—like His personhood– is generous, abundant, overflowing. Welcome. Come home and stay. Enjoy the fruitfulness.

I make strides at this sometimes. (My dream still calls for more wildflowers and less concrete.) The 70 degree weather is cooperating. The impatiens, tomatoes, and grapefruit are plentiful these days. Yesterday, I remarked to Greg, “Don’t these flowers make you so happy?!”

“No,” he replied, always theologically correct. Well then.

“Well, do they aid in your joy?”

Again, this time with a playful smirk, “No.”

Getting my theological bearings, I tried a third time, “Do they aid in your delight of the all-sufficient, marvelous handiwork of a creative, awesome God?” There.

“Yes.”

I thought of yesterday’s exchange during my reading this afternoon. Due to an unpublished review by Carmon Friedrich of Eric Brende’s Better Off (2004), I made the book my first read of the new year, even though it lacked classic status. It is the story of a MIT graduate and his new wife leaving behind modern technology for 18 months to live with a very primitive Amish-like group for the purpose of answering the question, “Is less really more?” Consider his thoughts on contentment:

In our era of high technology, affluent westerners spend billions every year to “get away” to exotic locales. They do so surely to escape the stress and frustration of modern life, but also to relieve its monotony. They spend forty-eight weeks [my edit: we are used to fifty weeks or so] of the year in the same job in a climate-controlled environment; when they go home in the evening, they travel on the same stretch of freeway to a subdivision where all the houses look the same; they watch television programs that reduce the complex issues of life to half-hour segments on a flat screen. They crave diversion, depth, escape. So they fly to Bermuda. [...] There may be another way. What if they just noticed the weather changing? (Better Off, p. 150)

While Leaf Watching for your vacation isn’t the author’s main intent in the remark, consider the sentiment. At first, simplifying our lifestyle happened more out of necessity than ideology. Going anywhere with five small children quickly became an equation where the return didn’t justify the output of energy. I could either cut down on our reproduction rate or I could cut down our keeping up with the Jones. Now, I believe that the artificial appetites created by always going here and there, to and fro are better filled by choosing carefully outside commitments and making home a place where everyone wants to be.

The children are happy to play catch, dig for worms, and play made-up games. Greg and I are content to watch from the front porch where the weather changes just enough to make it all very interesting.