I found this story in a sermon illustration search, and I just loved it:
A woman happened upon a decaying, sagging old home in the Appalachian Mountains. There is a haunted house in the woods, her friends had said. Do you want to see it?
The small house stands, falling slowly in time, in a clearing whose edges lay piled with a loose fence of stones, perhaps three feet high, grubbed out by hand from their abundance in the earth. Why is it haunted? I ask. A woman lived here with nine children.
It is a forlorn house now. The handhewn logs, with the cracks chinked, show in places where the facing wood has fallen off. There had been two stories, a room above and a room below. Now the doorways sag, the window lists and the roof is partially caved in. The clearing holds evidence of how hard the life must have been - enormous numbers of rocks moved to make a garden, water carried to grow enough to eat, wood cut and chopped for heating and cooking, weeds pulled, raccoons and deer chased away.
I am sad as I look in the tumbledown cabin for what I cannot see. But then I round the corner by the door, and there where the morning sun falls, a patch of daffodils grows. The
woman who lived there must have been given a few bulbs to plant. In the space of abandoned time, they have multiplied. As I pause, absorbing this largess of yellow near the woods still brown and the fields still beige, I suddenly know she watched in hope each early spring. That hope was affirmed and reaffirmed; and through the grace of God, she shares it with me, even now, in that patch of yellow daffodils.I hope that for years to come, even after we are gone on, people will wait with anticipation to see the daffodils come up. Hope is something that the church can provide, not simply through the beauty of nature, but most specifically by offering Jesus Christ to the community.
It's a beautiful day in God's world, be sure to see the good.
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