Flourish

She is all superlatives and rapture, you know.  Jane Austen, Persuasion

Flourish is a word I don’t often hear used in conversation.  The word brings to mind things like superlatives and rapture and people who use way too many exclamation points or dot their eyes with little hearts or something like that.  I hear the word flourish and picture people walking around wearing feather boas, for crying out loud.  Having lived in New England--the land of steady habits--for many years now, I’ve become used to hearing more practical terms:  persevere, maintain, manage, sustain, guard, defend.  I think I’ve grown cynical about the possibility of flourishing in life.

Maybe because the word sounds so foreign to my ears, I noticed how often it was used by speakers during the recent Jubilee conference.  Jubilee is a conversation about cultivating faithfulness in every area of life.  As speaker after speaker told stories about doing the work of building God’s kingdom, of working to repair and restore those things that are broken in this world, they kept returning to this idea of flourishing.  Work, as a friend often reminds me, is hard—which is one of the ways we distinguish it from all the other activities in our lives.  We do our work among thorns and thistles and stony ground that often refuses to yield fruit.  We do work in a broken, fallen world.

But these speakers, while acknowledging that work is hard, weren’t talking about things like persevering or maintaining or managing or sustaining.  They weren’t swapping stories about being trapped in cubicles or sorting through mind-numbing reports or juggling work deadlines and family responsibilities.

They were talking about flourishing.

Lisa Sharon Harper, one of the keynote speakers, used the word flourish in her presentation on the biblical concept of shalom.  Peace.  She asked us to close our eyes and imagine the world of Genesis 1, the world as God originally intended.  She asked us to imagine peace in relationships and beauty in creation and the fullness of oceans and skies that teemed and swarmed and flourished with an abundance of creatures.

Maybe flourishing seems such a foreign concept because it’s hard to imagine a world where it was once the norm.  We have conflict in our relationships, both at home and at work.  Ugliness has crept into our culture as pedestrian and pornographic images displace beautiful ones.  We hear that oil wells are spilling, that the polar ice cap is melting, and that the ocean’s temperature will rise and kill all the fish which once teemed and flourished in abundance.  We’ve become so far removed from what once was that we seek contentment in managing, maintaining, and guarding the brokenness of what is.

The Christian life, my pastor said recently, is not about managing sin.  He reminded us that Christ conquered sin and that, through Him, we participate in putting it to death in our lives.  We are no longer slaves who have to be content with muddling through the brokenness in our lives and in the world.  We are new creations, called and equipped to work toward peace and beauty and healing and the restoration of what once was and will be again.  We are free to find joy and satisfaction in our work as we participate in all things being made new.  We are free to express rapture and use exclamation points and superlatives.

We are free to flourish!

Now pardon me while I go look for my feather boa.

Linking with Jen and the sisterhood: