The Daffodil Principle
Philippians 1:1-13
September 29, 2002
St. John United Methodist Church
David Beckett, D.Min.

Have you ever been forced to go somewhere or do something you didn’t want to do? Maybe you went kicking and screaming…or pouting, but then you were so glad you did it? There is a story about a woman who was driven somewhere she didn’t want to go. It is a story about daffodils. But it is a story about so much more than flowers.

Betty (we’ll call her) was a mother and grandmother who lived about two hours from her daughter’s family. One day her daughter called and said, "Mother, you must come see the daffodils before they are over." Betty didn’t want to go, but she reluctantly agreed. When the day arrived it was cold and rainy, and she didn’t want to go. But she had promised and made the long drive to her daughter's. Plastic toys were strewn in the front yard, and a few pansies were blooming in a strip of dirt along the sidewalk. She walked into Carolyn's house and hugged her grandchildren. "Forget the daffodils, Carolyn! The road is invisible in the fog, and there is nothing in the world that I would rather see than you and these children."
Carolyn smiled calmly and with a touch of condescension and said, "We drive in this all the time, Mother." "Well, you won't get me back on the road until it clears, and then I'm heading for home!" Betty assured her. "It's all right, Mother, I promise. You will never forgive yourself if you miss this experience."
So they all piled into the car and 20 minutes later, they turned onto a small gravel road and approached a small church. On the far side of the church, there was a hand-lettered sign that read, "Daffodil Garden." They got out of the car and each took a child's hand, and Betty followed Carolyn down the path. As they turned a corner of the path, she looked up and gasped. Before her lay the most glorious sight. It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the mountain peak and slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns - great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink and butter yellow. Each different-colored variety was planted as a group so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue. There were five acres of flowers.
"Who has done this?" "It's just one woman," Carolyn answered. "She lives here." Carolyn pointed to a well-kept A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house. On the patio, we saw a poster. "Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking" was the headline. The first answer was a simple one: "50,000 bulbs," it read. The second answer was, "One at a time, by one woman. Two hands, two feet and very little brain." The third answer was, "Began in 1958."
There it was. The Daffodil Principle. For this woman, that moment was a life-changing experience. She thought of this woman whom she had never met, who, more than 40 years before, had begun - one bulb at a time - to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountaintop. Still, just planting one bulb at a time, year after year, had changed the world in which she lived. She had created something of ineffable magnificence, beauty and inspiration.
The principle of her daffodil garden is one of the greatest principles of celebration. That is, learning to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time, often just one baby-step at a time - and learning to love the doing, learning to use the accumulation of time. When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of daily effort, we, too, will find we can accomplish magnificent things. With the power of God we can change the world.
"It makes me sad in a way," Betty admitted. "What might I have accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal 35 or 40 years ago and had worked away at it 'one bulb at a time' through all those years? Just think what I might have been able to achieve!" Her daughter summed up the message of the day in her usual direct way. "Start tomorrow," she said. Her mother replied, "I'll start today."

The Daffodil Principle in this story is a good one: Start today - one step at a time - to change your world. This principle emerges, however, from the character and performance of the old lady herself who planted the daffodils. It might better be called "The Old Lady Principle."

If we focus on the daffodil, another, radically different principle emerges: It is in dying that we gain life. Or, after every crucifixion, there's a resurrection. Or, in losing oneself, we truly find our self. Jesus made this point both in his teaching and in his life, as the Philippians text notes. In his teaching, he used a grain of wheat. He might have used a daffodil bulb. "Unless a [daffodil bulb] falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single [bulb]" (John 12:24).

In the Philippians text, the apostle Paul interprets the pre-existence, life and death of Christ in a similar manner, showing that Christ plunged into the soil of humanity, taking the form and likeness of humankind, and in that form died on the cross. God then exalted him and gave him a name above all other names. Paul’s point? "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus" (2:5).
So there is both text and subtext for the Daffodil Principle. The text is: Start today -one step at a time - to change your world. The subtext is: You may die a little in doing it. That's okay. Change and growth occur as the old is stripped away and the new is allowed to emerge.

Do you want your marriage to change and become more loving? Using the Daffodil Principle, what "bulb" can you plant today to move towards this goal? Do you want God to connect with your teenagers? What small step can you as parents take in order to be the "wire" that helps make that connection? Would you like to bring more beauty and a gentler spirit to your work place? Which one of your co-workers needs an act of caring from God through you? We must remember that this process of "planting daffodil bulbs" is not always an easy one. We will be tempted to look for short cuts.

Here's a story from Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek: "I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.
When we embark on a journey to plant daffodil bulbs, that is, to create beauty in our part of the world, it is a journey that will certainly involve struggle and difficulty. Part of living the spiritual journey is to realize there are no short cuts, no easy paths. A woman living along a gravel road near a church, down a little path, spent her life creating something beautiful. In her case, it took several decades, 50,000 daffodil bulbs and the work of her hands and feet.
You think she didn't want to sleep in some morning? You think her back didn't ache at the end of the day? You think her knees didn't hurt when she knelt in the soil? You think she never thought about quitting? She died a thousand deaths in those years she was changing the world. That's what no one sees. But the impact of her efforts inspired countless people who wandered upon her garden to go and do likewise. Maybe they head out and plant their own daffodil bulbs. Or maybe they cultivate some other project with the capacity to bloom.

In his book, "In the Beginning," Chaim Potok writes, "All beginnings are hard. I can remember hearing my mother murmur those words while I lay in bed with fever. 'Children are often sick, darling. That's the way it is with children. All beginnings are hard. You'll be all right soon.' He remembers "bursting into tears one evening because a passage of Bible commentary had proved too difficult for me to understand. I was about nine years old at the time. 'You want to understand everything immediately?' my father said. 'Just like that? You only began to study this commentary last week. All beginnings are hard. You have to work at the job of studying. Go over it again and again.'
All beginnings are hard. Any new effort we undertake to be like Christ will be hard. We need to be patient and recognize there will be bad days. There will be struggles. There will be poor choices.
Confederate Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner, whose West Point friendship with Ulysses S. Grant survived the Civil War, liked to tell the story of an old resident in his Kentucky home who was celebrated for his down-home wisdom. "Uncle Zeke," a young man once asked, "How does it come you're so wise?"
"Because," said the old man, "I've got good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience well, that comes from poor judgment."

I know about poor judgment. With all my experience at making poor decisions I am hopeful that one day I will be a wise old man. Since I will turn 50 pretty soon I’m afraid I will become old much sooner before I become wise!

The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it doesn’t matter how many poor decisions you have made. It doesn’t matter that you might be getting a late start in planting some daffodil bulbs. When we turn towards Jesus and give our lives to him, we are forgiven and freed to begin again.
If we were to paraphrase Paul we could say, "We should have the same attitude as was in the daffodil lady." She herself is an example of what Christ did in living and dying among us. It's not too late. Go out and plant something beautiful. Yes, maybe it will be cold out there. It might be dark. But people, like daffodils, were created to bloom.

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