One of life’s joys is to find a small patch of beautiful, fragrant flowers, almost hidden by weeds, and yet still blooming amidst the ugliness. Sometimes you meet people like that who, in the most unlikely surroundings, live lives of beauty and fragrance. It reminds me of the young migrant, who was so grateful to his volunteer English teacher that he picked her a bunch of flowers and gave them to her with a note that said; “These flowers will fade and lose their fragrance; but you, dear teacher, will smell forever.”
Even though the colloquialism was wrong, the message was right. People like that teacher remind us that when the final account of our lives is given, the judgement will not be on where we lived or the position we held, but rather on how well we bloomed where we were planted.