I Found God in the Rosebushes

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

An Essay by Aberdeen Livingstone

I sit on the edge of my soft bed and stare out the window at sweet swaths of wisteria and contemplate the bleakness of my life. 

In the back of my throat is that post-cry stickiness, and I finally say out loud what the storm of my weeping has brought me to: 

“Really, what I'm most scared of is You.” 

I feel emptied once I say it, totally spent, the way I used to feel after a good workout. Back before pain started pulling the carpet of my life out from under my feet and unraveling it before my eyes. 

Mere months ago, I was visiting colleges and comparing majors and dreaming of internships, studies abroad, and dorm amenities; now it is increasingly likely that I’ll never live on my own. There’s a strange pain etching itself into my nerves and tendons from my fingertips to the base of my skull, skittering along my collarbones and shoulder blades like electric wiring gone awry. I have learned to judge how bad a day will be by how much it hurts to brush my teeth after breakfast. 

I try, for the first time in my life, to be honest: How can I live on my own when I can’t bear to swipe open an app on my phone? How can I feed myself if I can't chop up vegetables, much less carry groceries? 

But that, as I tell God, or the void, is not what I’m most scared of, not really. My greatest fear is that the concrete floor under the carpet of my dreams is also crumbling. 

I tell Him that He must be either a malicious trickster, dangling my dreams in front of me only to yank them away the minute I reach for them, or He is a statue of ice on a distant mountaintop, completely unaffected by my grief. 

Either way, I’m terrified. 

𖡼 𖡼 𖡼

That fall, I walk laps around our little back patio. There is the pine tree in the corner that my sisters climb to spy on our neighbors’ garden. There are the vines draped over the fence that keep out nosy eyes. And there are the rose bushes. 

It’s the season of the final blooms, and they saved their best for last. They hold up their heads of wide, frothy petals, layer upon layer of delicately colored folds. When it rains, pearls of water hang on each petal like glass figurines.

I hug my arms to my torso and walk in loops from flower to flower, like they are the only things keeping me sane. 

Such pain. Such beauty. 

𖡼 𖡼 𖡼

In the year that follows, my worst fears come true. I don’t leave home. I defer my college acceptance, email a future roommate that I wouldn't be joining her after all, and settle into a year of no school, no structure, no plan. 

During the day, I take long walks across misty fields. At night, I lie awake and scream silently at God. 

But somewhere along the way, it becomes screaming with God. Then somehow, sometimes, ever so slowly, it becomes resting in the silence after the screaming. 

And I begin to notice something. Every part of me that hurts is also a part of God mentioned in the Bible. 

My hands scream after holding a pencil—but He has a mighty right hand, and I am held in His palms. (Ps. 20:6)

My arms throb—but He has everlasting arms. (Deut. 33:27) 

My shoulders ache after only an hour of work—but His shoulders, they bear the weight of kingdoms. (Isa. 9:6) 

Those verses describe every part of me that hurts as a place where Jesus is strong. The comparisons comfort me. They get me out of bed each day and quell the terror at night. 

But what I love most is the idea that Jesus was pierced where I am. He was weak where I am. 

After the resurrection, Jesus told Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:27, NIV) 

His hands are scarred. I can press the center of my palm and feel pain radiate into my armpit. I can squeeze my wrist and feel my fingers fuzz like a bad internet connection. And there, right there, the God of the universe bears scars forever. 

John Mark McMillan says it all:

I've got no answers 

For hurt knees or cancers 

But a Savior who suffers them with me (1)

If it wasn’t for the scars of my God, I don’t know if I’d still believe. This is my anchor to God: our shared bruising. 

The realization of Jesus as the Scarred God becomes the soil of my faith—concrete no longer, but dirt, old as time, rooting, resilient, alive. He isn’t a trickster or a statue of stone. He isn’t teasing me, and He isn’t ignoring me. He is bleeding and weeping with me. He is dying with me. 

And maybe, just maybe, He is rising again with me too. 

𖡼 𖡼 𖡼

When I go to a massage therapist for treatments that don't heal me but keep the pain at bay so that eventually I do move out and go to college and find new life breathed into my dreams, they slather my arms with ointment and scrape my muscles. Immediately, my skin flares up vibrant pink. It’s a sign of inflammation, I’m told. The visible marker of internal sickness. 

But it also reminds me of the color of those roses on the patio: so many shades of pink, bright beacons against the dark gray skies and somber autumn leaves. 

I believe good things will grow from this pain. I believe my God’s blood drops onto barren soil and lush gardens spring up, streams in the desert. I’ve already seen it. And I will see more.

𖡼 𖡼 𖡼

1. McMillian, John Mark. “The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds.” Track 8 on Peopled with Dreams, February 2020. Lionhawk Records.

Aberdeen Livingstone lives in Brooklyn and works in nonprofit development. She has poetry in Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, and Fare Forward, among others, and recently published her debut poetry collection, Velocity: Zero. She writes regularly for her substack, Awaken Oh Sleeper.