Again I tell a story that has its roots in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.  As I wandered the trails on my quest to find something pretty to photograph, I made my way to the rose gardens.  I was confident I would find many beautiful flowers growing in the rose garden.  I remembered the last time I had visited this spot and thought of all the different varieties of plants growing there.  I recollect thinking that it looked like someone had taken a rainbow and used its colors to paint each of the leaves.  I walked with much anticipation toward the large collection of roses when I thought back on how the rich fragrance surrounded and clung to that place.

                  Then as I entered the gate that surrounds the garden I was amazed.  Not a single flower had any color on it; no reds, no yellows, no pinks, just flower after flower of nothing but brown.  In fact this is a photo of one of the “prettiest” flowers in the garden.  There was nothing here that would make the average person searching for a pretty picture ever come back; nothing smelt good, nothing looked good, just row after row of withered leaves and dried-up flowers.

                As I surveyed the ravaged rose graveyard I began to wonder what it would take to make this place look like the paradise I had remembered.  Then it came to me, all that is needed is just a little time.  Soon the temperature will rise as it always does in Alabama and in just a few days everything in this place will change.  Then I took another look at those withered flowers and imagined each one as it shall look in the future.  And suddenly something happened; they began to take on a new appearance.  I realized that they had great potential; and locked up somewhere in each of those dried plants something beautiful was just waiting to be summoned.

                Today, let us look at the things around us, not as they are, but as they could be.  Let us realize that many of the people we will meet today are like uncut diamonds, and have many shining qualities lying dormant beneath a rough exterior.  Let us not only look for the best in the people we love but let us assist them in becoming all that they could be.  We have tremendous power in our ability to help and encourage one another.  Our words and actions when used to encourage and strengthen have an incredible amount of power.  Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so.  Tell someone that you believe in them and suddenly, they start believing in themselves.  Use your influence today, what have you got to lose?

Something to think about:

• We blossom under praise like flowers in sun and dew; we open, we reach, we grow.

• Encouragement is oxygen to the soul.

• Our Father is a Specialist at making something useful and beautiful out of something broken and confused.

• If you treat a person as he is, he will stay as he is; but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

• Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.

• A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

Still looking for something pretty
Rickey Moore