Purposefully patterned

“Look at this fern,” I remarked as we followed paths in a botanical garden in southeast Kauai, “it has polka dots!” After seeing so many brilliantly-colored flowers amidst the garden’s intense green foliage, I found this fern unique, even amusing. Later, I learned that it’s popularly called the “Laua’e Fern,” also identified by the scientific name Microsorium scolopendria plydodium, which means a lot more to a botanist than to me. The plant I saw somehow came to Hawaii across the ocean from other Pacific islands or  tropical Asia. Its polka dots are actually spores that are part of its reproductive system.

Curious about how ferns reproduce (maybe I should have majored in biology!), I found the “f” volume of our family encyclopedia. Oh my, I encountered “Fifty Shades of Green” in reading of how a fern makes many little ferns. It all reminded me of the incredible plan of God that “like makes like.”

But what’s true in the natural world isn’t always true in the spiritual world.  God has a way of using people who are “marked” in ways that aren’t naturally pretty. Instead of “polka-dotted,” they’re pocked emotionally or physically. But God sees through that to what they could become, and what they can do for His Kingdom. That’s when “unlike,” by asking Christ to transform a life, can produce “like”—that is, a fruitful life that God originally intended.

I remember the first time I heard a broadcast featuring an evangelist who spoke with difficulty but positive passion, “I have cerebral palsy. What’s your problem?” David Ring, born in 1953 with this congenital condition, was orphaned by age fourteen. Depressed from his loss and the difficulties of his disability, he contemplated suicide many times. Then, he turned his life over to Jesus Christ. He finished college, married and had children, and became a motivational speaker who chides Christians who make excuses of why God can’t use them.

God can create beautiful, polka-dot ferns in the world around us. He can also bring beauty and service out of the ugly things life shoves at us. The difference is in a relationship to Jesus Christ, who said:

I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing…This is to my father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. (John 15:5, 8)