wild violet

To my finite human mind, it seems that God, when planning the days of my life, must have written the whole thing out in reverse. How else could the story unfold so beautifully? Take, for example, my family's recent move.

My husband and I tied the knot in 1995 in Savannah, GA. Simultaneously, completely unbeknownst to us, an adorable house was being built a thousand miles away in Gansevoort, NY. That was seventeen years ago. Since then, my husband and I have been through a lot. We stumbled around, found Jesus half way through, started praying and trusting God—all of that, in Savannah.

Meanwhile, up in Gansevoort, various families lived in the little brick house. They remodeled, knocked down walls, planted tons of flowers. Most recently, they painted the back bedroom violet.

Now. This little house has many charms: artfully designed hardwood floors and trim; a huge rolling yard surrounded by a white picket fence; a beautifully finished basement. But it was the violet room that made me swoon. Because for the last fourteen years, my illustrator name has been Violet.

As we were getting settled a few weeks ago, unpacking and all of that, my son Gray was performing his first chore in our new home: weeding the glorious flower beds surrounding the house. For a while he was directly outside my (violet) studio window. As I was arranging books on the shelf, I saw him take off running across the yard, heard him come in through the garage and kick off his shoes, heard his bare feet pad over white kitchen tile and down the hand-crafted oak hallway. Breathless and excited, smudged with dirt from head to toe, he smiled at me through the studio doorway. "Follow me," he said. He was wearing his best grin.

My sweet son led me to the front flower bed. We stopped outside the studio window. "Look," he said, pointing down low. I stooped to see. In the shade at the front of the bed, in the space between the bushy black-eyed Susans and the landscaping bricks, as bright and glorious as a glimpse of heaven, grew a single wild violet. And—as if there had been any doubt—I knew that we were home.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

 Psalm 139:16, NIV 1984

*