Overnight

    I walked past the row of closed tulips, their buds completely closed, green, with the faintest hint of uncertain color the only indication that they would not always remain a green that blended with the grass around them. I saw there were no weeds, that there was nothing left but waiting, waiting as I had waited for months, as the snow melted, and yet there was nothing but cold, wind, frost, and prickly pine needles. There was more waiting as the green came slowly up from the ground, the leaves first, then the stalks, the small buds reaching higher, above the grass, the bud getting larger the further up it grew. The leaves had been showing for weeks, the buds clearly formed from almost the beginning, and yet I was still waiting. I walked on.
    The next day, glorious explosions of rich red sat on seven stalks beside our house. The blossoming had happened overnight, the green transformed into a scarlet to adorn kings. The waiting had finished overnight.
    Weeks later, I followed my customary walk to work, past the garden rich with hundreds of flowers, and the promise of hundreds more in the green still sprouting up, past the tree I had to bend to walk beneath, with its small flowers brushing my head, past the large tree that towered above the power lines and dropped petals on my head, and then stopped dead at the yard three houses down from my work. Yesterday, there had been two trees with small spheres covering most of the outside branches; today there were flowers so thickly clustered I could not see the wooden branches at all. I had wondered when it would bloom, yet I had not expected that sudden transformation, as if a fairy kissed it the night before and the flowers opened in celebration. I drew a breath of its lovely fragrance, reminded myself I had to be at work, and walked on.
    But I couldn't stop thinking about it. Overnight, between 7 pm and 8 am,  buds became blossoms, a wooden thicket became a bird's bower, and promise had turned into beauty. Overnight. Yet the waiting had been long; I had waited much longer then thirteen hours.
    I have been waiting two years, three hundred and sixty-three days, and eight hours. I am waiting for the flowers to follow winter, the scars to turn to character, the drudge to triumph. I am waiting for the promise to became the reward, the faith to become sight, the truth to be uncontradictable. I am still waiting, wondering if blossoms ever show this side of heaven. I am waiting to see if this time is the promise of God's good plan, or the desert I die in without a single offering of beauty to give out in return for living here. It seems too long, with no fruit, and I am so tired of waiting.
    Yet I now see God's flowers can blossom overnight. The years of pruning, growth, and settling will blossom, but it will be in God's timing, and it may happen all at once; it does not have to be as slow as the growing process can be. It can be overnight, and then beauty and reward adorn the desert, and I breath in the reminder that God is good, and His plan prefect, as perfect as a flower that blossomed overnight.