Resiliency

We moved about 2 years ago and our new place had some flowers in the back that were overrun by weeds. I have never been as dedicated of a gardener / yard caretaker as I would like to be, but I'm really trying to do better at this house than I was at the last one, so I tried to weed around these flowers to see if they would come back to life. This week, they bloomed, and I believe they are bearded irises:

Plants often remind me of how resilient things can be; they seem to be able to make all kinds of things work and don't really seem to take a hint when you want them to go away, especially not weeds. In the Book of Mormon, Alma teaches that nature testifies of God:

all things denote there is a God; yea, even the ^bearth, and ^call things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its ^dmotion, yea, and also all the ^eplanets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.

As these blossomed, I've been studying that same Alma the Younger's dramatic repentance as part of the Come, Follow Me reading for the week. In thinking about the flowers and the reading, I wondered how many people have given up on themselves as followers of Christ due to problems that are much easier to solve than Alma the Younger's sins. In order to repent completely, Alma would have to publicly repudiate everything he'd done in the past; he would have to admit he was wrong and or lying to people for years, and he'd have to become a completely different person. Sometimes we may have messed up badly, and we may need to greatly humble ourselves to repent, but even if our sins are worse than Alma's the Savior suffered specifically to be able to correct these wrongs.

I am so grateful that Alma was resilient enough to believe Christ could help him change. I pray that we all can exercise faith in the same principle as we try to overcome our own sins, big and small. People bloom more beautifully than flowers.