April 9, 2026 | Pastor Ellen Beach

Spring is my favorite season, and I will tell you exactly why.

It is not just the warmer temperatures or the longer days, though I am grateful for both. It is the greenway near my home. Being outdoors in God's creation reminds me of His greatness and His attention to detail. It resets my thinking, and I begin to let the cares of life fade as I take in His beautiful creation. Every single walk feels like I am moving through an art gallery that God curated personally. The dogwoods doing their thing. The wildflowers pushing up through the ground like they have somewhere important to be. The trees showing off with every shade of green imaginable. I find myself stopping more than I walk some days, just standing there taking it all in.

And here is what gets me every single time. Every plant is completely different from every other one.

Not one of them is trying to be another. The dogwood is not apologizing for not being a rose. The clover is not embarrassed to be growing low to the ground while the oak towers above it. Every variety is doing exactly what it was made to do, in exactly the way it was designed to do it, and the whole greenway is breathtaking precisely because of that diversity.

Psalm 92:13 says that those who are planted in the house of the Lord will flourish in the courts of our God.

The word planted is doing so much work in a single verse. In a world that rewards urgency and applauds speed, planted is almost a countercultural word. Planted means your roots are going down even when nothing visible is happening above the ground. Even when the season feels long, even when the people walking past cannot yet see what is being developed underneath, your roots are going deeper.

You cannot rush planted things and you cannot compare them. You cannot look at a dogwood in January, bare and dormant and stripped of every bloom, and conclude that it is failing. It is not failing. It is building the root strength that will produce that breathtaking display in April. A dormant season is not a dead season. It is the preparation season.

And some of us, like the dogwoods, are late bloomers.

Not every plant on the greenway opens at the same time. Some burst into color the first week of March while the ground is still cold. Others wait until the warmth has fully settled in before they show a single petal. The ones that bloom last are not the ones that failed. They are often the most stunning ones and make you stop in awe because you were not expecting that much beauty that late in the season.

If you have been looking around at everyone else and feeling like you are behind, hear this clearly today. You are not behind. You are on a timeline that God designed specifically for you: not for the person next to you, not for whoever you have been quietly comparing yourself to, not for the version of your life you thought you would have by now. Friend, I have wasted years in this cycle, and I want you to avoid my mistake.

Flourishing is the promise of Psalm 92. It is not grinding endurance or a performance you put on to convince people you are okay. Flourishing looks like the dogwood so covered in white blooms that you slow your pace just to take it in. God has prepared that kind of visible, undeniable, breathtaking flourishing for you. It will be grown out of the quiet and faithful work of staying planted through every season, including the ones that felt like they would never end.

And guess what…Your flourishing is going to look like you. The dogwood and the wildflower and the oak are all flourishing at the same time, and not one of them looks like another. You are not supposed to bloom the way the person next to you blooms. Your flourishing will be beautifully and entirely your own.

Stay planted in prayer, in Scripture, in Godly friendships, in the house of the Lord. Keep showing up. Keep going deep. Keep trusting that the God who designed the late bloomer knew exactly what He was doing when He designed you too.

Your flourishing is coming. You just have to stay planted long enough to see it.

This week, get outside. Let God's creation reset your thinking. Let the cares of life get smaller as His greatness gets bigger. Let every blooming, beautiful, entirely unique plant along that path be a living reminder that the same God who told the late bloomer exactly when to open has not forgotten the promise He made to you.

You are not behind. Stay planted.

With love,

Pastor Ellen