On Not Needing a Reason

A wildflower doesn't apply for permission to bloom. It doesn't calculate whether the ground is fertile enough to be worth the effort, or whether anyone's walking by to see it. It just grows — toward light, toward water, toward whatever small mercy the season offers — and that's the whole of its work.

Jesus points to this in Matthew 6:28, and it's a strange thing to hold up as instruction. Not a parable with a moral to extract, not a lesson to file away — just an invitation to actually look at something that exists without justifying itself.

Most days don't leave much room for that kind of looking. There's a logic to how attention gets spent: on what needs doing, what needs answering, what needs fixing. It's not a wrong way to move through a day. But it does tend to flatten the world into a checklist, and things that can't be checked off — a colour, a shape, a bit of unplanned beauty — get filed under "later" and quietly forgotten.

Here's what's worth turning over, maybe on a walk or in a quiet moment before the day picks up speed:

Is there anything that delights you that serves no purpose at all?

What's grown too familiar to actually see anymore?

If perceived usefulness stopped being the filter, what would stand out?

What might be delighting God right now, unnoticed?

That last one is the one that stays with me. It suggests delight isn't a mood we're chasing — it's something already happening, on God's part, toward things we've stopped registering. The wildflower isn't waiting to be admired before it counts. It's already loved into existing at all.

Maybe the practice, then, isn't about finding something spectacular to marvel at. It's letting one small, unremarkable thing be enough — not because it earns the attention, but because it doesn't have to.

Reflection inspired by themes of delight, attention, and grace — prompted by Stillmere Contemplative Reflections Cards, Vol. 4: "Brother Sun, Sister Moon."