Jun12026
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Annuals or perennials: that is the question.

I always planted annuals because they are beautiful and they flower all summer. The problem with them is that they die at the end of the season, so you have to go to Home Depot or a nursery to buy a whole new batch and replant them. It cost a lot of money and hard work, so I switched to perennials. Perennials are wonderful because they come up every year, so you just pay once and have them forever. The problem with perennials is that they only flower for two weeks of the year. They look great for a short time. That is why you will never see a tulip in the fall or a day Lilly in the spring. It would be nice to have the best of both worlds, a plant that never dies and blossoms all year. The Bible describes humans as a flower that blossoms in the morning and withers in the evening. That is to say, we are the worst of both worlds. Yet, if we could change that and bear fruit all the time and never die, would you do it?

I go on vacation with my family every year in Maine, and I always climb a mountain near the camp. When I get to the top, I sit on a large rock. I say to the rock, “You have been around for a while.” I assume it has been there since the last ice age, and I do not think a bulldozer will move it anytime soon. The rock will probably be there at the start of the next ice age. If I made an imaginary line and drew it from one ice age to the other, that line would represent the existence of that rock. If we represented our existence on that same line, we would be a dot, a puff, a flash. But what if we could change that, what if we could go from a dot to a line, would you do it?

Our mortality is like a cloud hovering over our heads. We can ignore it by not looking up at it, but it is still there; it is always there. But if you could get rid of that cloud, would you do it? That is what the feast day of Corpus Christi is all about: “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

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