Here is the link to the Mormon Times version of
this story published August 28 in the Deseret News.
Isaiah said that Christ was a "root out of dry ground." (53:2) Maybe He is like a sunflower. From mid to late July Sunflowers begin to bloom around here in all the most desolate dry areas in the hills, roadsides and empty spaces. They continue to bloom until winter hits in November. I have seen little sunflower buds continue to show their sunny faces through the last hours of fall. On the empty lot next to me all the weeds are dying from lack of water but the sunflowers are doing fine and blooming. I want to know how to be a "root out of dry ground" – a sunflower but only idealistically. Mostly I want to live sheltered in a greenhouse being watered, fertilized and pampered daily. But, this is never going to happen for any of us because Christ knows that being a sunflower is a choice opportunity. He wants us all to have the sunflower experience.
Recently I finsihed reading the 4 gospels. During this time I have thought a lot about Christ and all the healing he did. Surely, a day never went by when He didn’t heal someone. It has made me think about wanting to be healed. I have wondered if I could ever muster enough faith to have my Rheumatoid Arthritis completely healed. There are wonderful words in the temple that focus on health and it makes me think that being well must be very important to our Heavenly Father. I have mulled this over and over as I have reflected on all the healing accounts in the gospels and my faith.
One day last week I walked the hills, amid the sunflowers to my wilderness temple, contemplating these things when a profound thought came to me. Oh, I am sure someone else has thought and taught this before but it was a new concept to my brain. Christ was not telling us to worry so much about being healed as that we should be a healer. He never took Paul’s "thorn in the side" from him. Do these thorns keep us humble? I have always appreciated that Paul didn’t tell us what his thorn was. We can all wonder if he had our infirmity.
Christ was always trying to teach us by example. So, His daily healing was also for us—to help us realize that we need to be a frequent healer. We need to be a bright sunflower growing up without all the nourishment we think we need and to bloom with our happy faces toward the "Son"—even when our life isn’t ideal.
I hope the profusion of these happy sun flowers, growing in dry rocky places, will remind me to try harder to be a healer, filled with love. Maybe it is the answer to healing ourselves too.
