JOY ALONG THE WAY: FLOWERS WILL GROW ON THE MOUNTAIN

Sometimes I read something so precious that I want to quote it, fearing that some others may not have come across it. In this case it is something that Arthur Gordon, former editor of "Guideposts", has passed along.

Mr. Gordon says that somewhere in North Carolina, chiseled into a gravestone, are these words:

Flowers will grow on the mountains.

Spring will come again to the valley.

And the Shepherd will return for his sheep.

We are left to wonder if the person buried there coined those words in his or her lifetime or whether someone else supplied them, describing the simple faith the person buried there lived by.

The words, in their simplicity, are so powerful. The first two lines we can testify to, having witnessed with our own eyes these events. And, having witnessed the eternal truth of them, by faith we believe in the third.

In addition to the comfort the words bring, to some they send the mind back to remembered mountains sprinkled in season by flowers and to fresh, fairy-splashing streams making their way to the valleys.

Among the flowers that return to the mountains of North Carolina would be rhododendrons and azaleas. And the steep slopes of the Blue Ridge would send down streams of water more hurried than those of the Ozarks.

I think of the flowers that returned to my familiar Ozark Mountains, some for their beauty, some for their fragrance.

As soon as warm weather came and vegetation began to grow, our cows were released to roam the surrounding mountains (open range then). I can still see, in my mind's eye, the twisty, switching tails as they crossed the creek and made their way up old woods roads to spread out and partake of the banquet prepared for them. This meant that my chores had changed too. I had to go round up those cows to drive them home in the early evening for they were reluctant to leave their re-discovered Elysian fields.

So it was along this way I learned that flowers would return to the mountains. Same time. Same place. I knew where the horse mint (monarda) was, the woodbine, the May apples, the bird's-foot violets, fleabane, butterfly weed, yarrow, iron weed, goldenrod and many others. Always and always they returned to the mountains.

And, there being mountains, there were always the valleys to receive the watershed. Such happy little streams they were, gurgling over stones, splashing down small waterfalls, setting the overhanging fiddlehead ferns and wild columbines in motion. One could almost smell the fragrance of the mountain mint and pennyroyal pastures the water brought down from the mountains.

When one witnesses these things year after year, how could he/she not believe that the Author of this Divine Order would not also keep His promise that the Shepherd will return for His sheep.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.