Solomon's Nightgown

Down home in Reevesville, in the field where we used to play football, my father has planted daylilies. That sounds a little tame. Imagine enough yard space for at least 6 boys to have a lot of room for a football game. Now, imagine that space full of flowers. What word comes between garden and farm?

It is very close to peak daylily season in Reevesville. When last I was down there, Dad gave me a few plants to bring back home with me. I have decided to be his discount outlet store, so I loaded the car with 32 plants to find good homes for west of "the swamp".

The one thing I have learned about daylilies is statistics. Every variety of the flower has a pedigree and a detailed description that rivals the information on the back of Topps baseball card from the '80's. Here you can learn if you plants are evergreen or dormant. You can get a good estimate of how tall the stalks (scapes) will be and how big the blossoms will be.

Over the last 15 years, Dad has moved over 600 varieties of daylily through the "farden". When I was raiding the clearance aisle, he pointed out one in particular, lending some statistical analysis, "Take that one, it's real pretty."

Yesterday evening, I noticed something odd about this plant. I had to go look it up--turn its "card" over. The daylily known as Tuscawilla Taj Mahal is evergreen, throws right, bats right, hit .387 in it's last year in the minors, and it's NOCTURNAL. The unusual thing I saw was that at 7:30 p.m. it was starting to open. I checked it again at midnight, and it had opened more. At 4:00 a.m. it was in full bloom.

Jesus told his followers not to worry. "Consider the lilies of the field, "he said, "They neither toil nor spin, but I tell you the truth, even Solomon in all his splendor was not clothed like one of these." It is so easy to give in to anxiety. It is so easy to let our fears paralyze us. We have heard it's always darkest before the dawn, but scientifically, we know it is darkest at midnight with 6-7 more hours of dark to come. Having hope as followers of Jesus means that we hold on to that hope when it would be a whole lot easier to be hopeless. Even in our own darkness, it's a great help to know that there are lilies that bloom at night. "Will He not much more clothe you?"