100 Reasons Why I Want to Be a Flower Farmer: Reason #1

When I tell family and friends I am going to grow flowers in my yard and try to sell them at farmers markets, I am often met with the question, "where did this idea come from?" 

I don't have one good answer for them. It's one hundred reasons. 

The short answer is that after having my fourth baby, God planted the idea to grow flowers in my heart, and then the idea just grew and blossomed out of control (Flower puns intended)!  

The long answer is that there really are 100 reasons.  

Literally.  

When I started being asked the question “why” and realized I did not have a good answer, I started a list on my phone of the reasons why I wanted to be a flower farmer. Because once I had the idea, to begin with, the little confirmations and reasons why I really should do it just kept popping into my head.  Whenever another reason came to mind, I wrote it down.  At first, I thought maybe I would do a “10 reasons why I want to be a flower farmer” Facebook post or something. Then, I kept having more and more reasons pop into my head. Some were big, others very small. Over only a couple of weeks, the list was nearing 40 reasons. That’s when I got the idea to start a blog as a part of our website! We had already started the website and purchased the domain name, so why not?!  And the list just kept growing and growing! 

So here we are. I’m ready to declare to the world that I want to be a flower farmer! 

I wrote the reasons down in the order they occurred to me, but I plan to share them in no particular order. 

With one exception.  

Reason #1. Y'all need to know this first and foremost before anything else. 

Reason #1 comes to you courtesy of my five-year-old daughter, who recently very thoughtfully asked me, "Mommy, why do you love flowers so much?" 

Then it occurred to me: there was no immediate reason I could give her for loving flowers on a surface level that didn't sound superficial, somewhat meaningless, super cheesy, or just generally barfy. 

"Because they're pretty?" No, that's not it. 

"They're so colorful!" No. I love any color, any plant: green, white, brown, whatever. 

"Gardening is fun!" Is that why I do things? Just for fun? Growing flowers is a lot of back-breaking work if it's just for fun. 

Then it dawned on me: It's not the flowers I love. 

It's the God who grows them. 

Think about it. Flowers are there to attract pollinators, which will allow the plants to make seeds and reproduce. Our all-powerful creator God, could have made plants reproduce in a million different ways. They could have spit seeds right out the top of the stem. All plants could have just been spread by rhizomes underground, and that’s it. He could have just made it so a new identical plant grows next to its parent plant each spring, and that’s it. No fanfare, no show, just boring identical plants that reproduce purely as an act of necessity to survive.  

Instead, he made FLOWERS. And not just one singular type of flower for every plant. That would have been far more simple. But no!  

He made flowers upon flowers in unending, uncountable, still-being-bred-to-new-varieties sizes and shapes. Flowers for all seasons, climates, and amounts of sun or shade. Flowers in every color you can imagine and then some!  Flowers that dance in the wind, breathing out exquisite fragrances in abundant variety. Flowers that express all ranges of emotion, exuberance, liveliness, or refined simplicity and balance.  

FLOWERS. 

What an incredible, generous God to give such a gift. What a sweet reminder of how good His creation is and what a true gift it is to us. What a reminder of His gift of freedom in Christ. His precious gift of amazing grace in Jesus. His gift of eternal worship and His glory to come, forever. 

To me, it’s so much bigger than flowers, so much deeper. My personal life mission is to facilitate growth that glorifies God. Whether it's students, my kids, my own process of personal development, or literal and actual flowers growing from the ground, may He be glorified.   

Join me and ALL creation as we shout His praises and bask in the unrelenting beauty of His love and creation, forever.  

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Interested in God, but want it simplified for you? Read this post for the good news of Jesus boiled down to four main points.