Yielding Of The Wild-Rose

Yesterday’s post contained an important concept from Elizabeth Elliot’s book, The Path to Loneliness; Death the New Beginning. If you haven’t read it… Click the link and take a short moment and do so. You will be blessed.

If you did read it… Click the link anyways, it is worth the re-read. This concept is actually more than important, it a crucial spiritual truth that must be grasped if we are to understand Truth… What is Truth? Jesus Christ is Truth, Messiah, Lord of All, Savior of the world, and His message… the hidden mystery of the gospel, the foundation of all spiritual belief.

The passage of yesterday, as some may have supposed, is not a lesson in botany and biology. Ms. Elliot points out that the circle of life consists herein of “life out of death and gain out of loss”. But unlike the temporal message given in the movie, The Lion King by Mufasa, Father Lion King of the Jungle, Jesus Christ gives us an eternal message of “life out of death and gain out of loss”. His message is not ‘life out of death’… dust to dust… gain—worm food, out of loss—completing the circle of life. His message is eternal, forever and ever— life ever-after, it is the message of the cross. “The Cross is a sign of loss—shameful, humiliating, abject, total loss. Yet it was Jesus’ loss that meant heavenly gain for the whole world. Although secured in a tomb with a heavy stone, a seal, and posted guards, He could not be held down by death. He came out of the grave as the Death of Death and Hells Destruction…
His death was a new beginning. Those who accept [this] truth receive not only the promise of heaven, but the possibility of heaven on earth, where the risen Christ walks with us, transforming, if we allow Him to, even in empty nest…This is what the Crucified Life is all about…. Deeper and deeper is the dying” (Elliot, 1988).

Ms. Elliot instructs us that if we have accepted Truth and called Him our one and only, we are like the glorious bloom of the wild rose. We are in a “full-blown beauty,[but our] very fulfillment depends on its continuous dying and living again”.

She continues by quoting a dear saint, Lilias Trotter in her book, Parables of the Cross.
“Deeper must be the dying, for wider and fuller is the lifetide that it is to liberate—no longer limited by the narrow range of our own being, but with endless powers of multiplying in other souls. Death must reach the very springs of our nature to set it free: it is not this thing or that thing that must go now: it is blindly, helplessly, recklessly our very selves. A dying must come upon all that would hinder Gods working through us—all interests, all impulses, all energies that are ‘born of the flesh’— all that is merely human and apart from His spirit.”

“Look at the expression of abandonment about this wild-rose calyx as time goes on, and it begins to grow toward the end for which it has had to count all things as loss: the look of dumb emptiness is gone— it is flung back joylessly now, for simultaneously with the new dying a richer life has begun to work at its heart— so much death, so much life—for,
Ever with death it weaveth, the warp and woof of the world…
the seed vessel has begun to form;
it is yielded to bring forth fruit” (Lilias Trotter, 1964).

“Deeper and deeper is the dying”…

Are you… am I, willing to yield with abandon? To become as the rose… blooming fully and give in to the dying… becoming intoxicatingly fragrant for Truth… The rose does not have a choice. It is.

We are given a choice… it is the gift of God. Will you choose to become, transform… or per chance, to seek Truth? The choice stands. How will you choose?