Buttercups

There’s a song I couldn’t get out of my head yesterday, “Buttercup,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. I grew up listening to that – my mother and father loved it – and once upon a time when I used to play viola, I played in the orchestra of a college Gilbert and Sullivan Society performance of it. The first love of my life was in that orchestra with me. I’d had a crush on him when we were in a youth orchestra in Boston together, and they needed a French Horn player, so I naturally asked him. My dreams finally came true at the cast party – it was a regular college party and they invited us, so we got a bit highjacked to give a calmer term of phrase. He tackled me on a couch and they applauded us when we came up for air. Ah, the exuberance youth.

I started thinking about the song when I walked by a little plot of ground with buttercups blooming madly on my way to work in the morning. I live in an area that is not country at all, and to see such a wealth of buttercups springing up so enthusiastically against an otherwise rocky and barren sidewalk was to go back in time to the springtimes of my childhood. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but if you hold them under your chin, the yellow is so bright it makes your chin glow. My father used to say it meant you liked butter if your chin glowed yellow, but everyone’s does – that’s what buttercups do. Their yellow is so powerful they change the color of everything else around them.

H.M.S. Pinafore has a really crazy plot. Everything turns on a dime and everything gets so jumbled around it’s hard to keep track of it. Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are like that. Parodies and mistaken identities and implausible plot turns and jokes upon jokes upon jokes everywhere. The music is wonderful, and the stories farcical, but also very wise. H.M.S. Pinafore pokes fun at the British class system – a Captain in the Navy is not really a captain, a sailor is really a Captain, and people who thought they could not marry because of class differences are able to live happily ever after. There are songs that are rousing and fun, songs that are very silly, and songs that are simply lovely. Pure entertainment on one level, but with lots of other levels too.

There’s a song that Buttercup sings at the end of Act I, “Things are seldom what they seem.” It foreshadows the crazy discovery at the end that tumbles our heads all around but brings everything out perfectly for the couples in love. God has a way of doing that – of tumbling things all around from the way we thought they were. You wake up one day and everything can change in an instant. If it’s a change for the good, you know that’s God. If it’s not something good, it’s coming from somewhere else, but God will still work it out in your favor. (Romans 8:28)

Romans 4:17 describes the faith of Abraham as that kind of crazy faith – the kind that knows that God will work everything out no matter what it looks like - and calls him the father of all people who have faith: “He is our father in the sight of God in whom he believed – the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.” The beginning of that passage is, “Therefore the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring – not only those who are of the law, but also to those who have the faith of Abraham.” (verse 16) If we have faith, we are justified by God, no matter what our background is. It’s an amazing promise – that it is our faith and not what we do or don’t do that makes us right with God. It is our faith and not whether we grew up in religious homes, or whether we've ever read a Bible. It is our faith and our faith alone that makes us heirs to the promises of God. (Romans 4:1-3)

It’s a bit tricky, though, because once you get to know God, you can’t just go around doing whatever you want to do just because you believe in Him. There’s a saying we have in church that even the devil believes in God. But something happens inside us when we begin to have faith. One thing leads to another and then all of a sudden we don’t want to do the same old stuff we used to do before. For me it was as simple as accepting  the love of God. It took me a while to get to that place because I'd never known a love like that before that didn't ask for anything in return and wasn't going to turn on me, but when I finally took that in, when I allowed myself to receive it, I suddenly recognized how unworthy I was to receive it, and I started to be so thankful to God, and then I wanted to get to know Him more, and that led to a deeper understanding of who He is, and that led to having a healthy dose of fear of the Lord. It’s healthy to know God in that way – when we recognize that it’s only by His grace and mercy that we are still breathing then we can know how much He really does love us, and then we can bring everything to Him and ask for His help to be healed.

Romans 4:18 reads, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of  many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Abraham was nearing 100 years old when He believed that promise, and his wife was 90 and had been barren all her life. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed. What a statement. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed. It makes me think of those buttercups, blooming away so hopefully in the middle of a sidewalk of a city.

There are times that God will promise us something that it just seems there is no hope for. We look at what we have and who we are, we look at “reality,” and it looks bleak, at least for the promise. Our lives may even be ok – Abraham and Sarah were happy together and had a nice life. They’d had their times of struggle, but things had always worked out all right. In a way the last thing they needed was a child at their old age. But that was the promise of God, and was a secret longing that each one had. God doesn’t play games with us. He doesn’t put things on our hearts to not fulfill them. When He made that promise to them, all they needed to do was believe that God is a God who answers the secret prayers of our hearts and who makes good on His promises to us.

If there is something in your life that God has spoken to you – a secret longing in your heart, remember that things are seldom what they seem and they can turn around in a moment’s time. God has a habit of doing that, and He can do it in the blink of an eye. All He’s asking for is for you to believe that what He has promised you He will do. And if you're having a hard time believing, ask Him for help - He'll even give you the faith that you need to keep believing, just like a buttercup will turn anyone's chin a bright yellow. The faith He has to give is so powerful, it will color the way you see everything else around you.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan