sunshine

Our attendance question in Kindergarten yesterday was, “What is your favorite kind of flower?”

Several of them, of course, chose the beautiful, bright dandelion as their favorite flower. They’ve been bringing me fistfuls of them after every recess and putting them in my little dandelion vase by the sink.

My busiest little guy (I’ll call him Luke) is an exhausting tangle of emotions. He is facing a lot of dark, frightening situations in his young life and they are generating behaviors in him that seem to be spiraling out of control. Yet despite the despair in his world, he has a smile that lights up a room. He is desperate for affection and love and will crawl up on the lap of any adult who might hold him.

Just like a dandelion, he is the kind of child easily viewed as a nuisance, as unwanted, as too much work. Even one of his classmates – usually very compassionate toward him – lamented during one of his recent meltdowns, “Our class would be very quiet and peaceful if Luke could be absent today.”

But there is hope for this boy. Dandelions don’t give up. They are determined to shine their bright faces despite mowers, weedkiller, and little kids plucking them. They are the “flowers of the field who neither labor nor spin, yet not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these (Matt. 6:28b, 29).” The Eternal Artist who designed each variety of flower, down to the common field weed, knows Luke by heart. He knows his real name. He knows his situation. He knows his future.

When it was his turn for the attendance question, I said, “Luke, what is your favorite flower?” He bounced out of his chair because he needed his whole body to come up with the words. He mimicked picking flowers as he said, “The ones at recess…the yellow…the….ummm…”

Then he jumped proudly and smiled because he’d remembered the name of the flower he was searching for. “Sunshine!” he shouted.

By Greg Hume – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17890515