Where Cherry Blossoms Come From

Last Wednesday, my Dad took me, my siblings, and our fellow Young Life volunteers out for a trip to Trinity Ranch (the Young Life campsite).  It's funny how, sometimes, we learn so much at such a short span of time.  We stayed at camp for only three days and I was amazed at the all the realizations that came to me by the time we drove home.  One of which was about finding out where cherry blossoms came from.

I live in the Philippines.  It's a small Southeast Asian archipelago in the western portion of the Pacific Ocean and it's a tropical country.  We only have two seasons, dry and wet.  This makes the Philippines a whole lot different from Japan, climate-wise.  Cherry (sakura) trees are usually found in cold climate and its flowers, the cherry blossoms, are most popular in Japan.  My brother tells me that Japan even holds a traditional cherry blossom festival every year.  So you could imagine how surprised we were when a neighbor told us yesterday that this tall tree on the campsite was actually a Cherry tree and quite a rare one at that, as it bore pink Cherry blossoms.

My dad says the tree is about twenty years old and he had no idea how it got there.

We passed under that tree hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times.  We talked about how sweet the air smelled and how pretty the flowers looked when they slowly floated down towards the grassy land.  But we never realized that this magnificent Cherry tree standing right before our eyes was the one responsible for such beauty.  We were in such hurry every time we passed by that we never bothered to figure out where the pretty things came from.

I think it has a lot to do with life.  We get so caught up with it that when we actually get the time to 'stop and smell the roses,' we tend to settle with doing just that.  We stop for a bit, get a whiff of the flowers (or in this case, the cherry blossoms), absorb all its beauty, and, after a little while, move on.  Get back to the mess we call life.  

In my case, whenever I get a break from law school, I catch up on sleep, I watch DVDs, I go online, I eat food I never get to enjoy anymore, I stay at home the whole day doing nothing.  Before I know it, the break has ended and I could barely remember ever feeling satisfied and content about it.  Why? Because I see these breaks as mere 'extra time' for myself instead of wonderful gifts that I should be thankful for.  I take the gifts for myself, and take the giver for granted.  And these moments, they just pass me by, like the faint scent of cherry blossoms in the air as I hurriedly trod under the shade of the cherry tree at Trinity Ranch.

What we need more than catching a break to smell the roses is actually hitting the pause button in life.  Stop, and see the source of all those pretty things.  Let's do more than just count our blessings, let's snoop around a bit and look for who it is that's constantly showering them to us.  Find out where all the cherry blossoms come from.  

Because, just like the cherry blossoms unusually found in a tropical country like ours, the best things in life are more beautiful when we stop in our tracks, take a long pause, look up, and realize that they are gifts, surprises that we did not deserve in the first place, but were showered upon all of us anyway.