What Kind of a Rose Would You Like?

Without specific knowledge of percentages, I would guess that 75 to 80% of buyers prefer red roses. However, I just read after an author who took two dozen yellow roses to a departed friend's memorial service because she favored yellow.

When my mother, Ida, went to be with the Lord, our neighbors brought us a lovely white rose bush to plant, and their young daughter, Rebecca, asked us if she "could help us bury it," in her sweet, caring words.

There are so many varieties of roses that no person should have or buy a rose he did not like. Basically, however, roses are roses, and are appreciated and loved for their beauty and frangrance.

Uniqueness would be another quality. "A rose by any other name would still be a rose".

Debatably - with a few exceptions - a rose is usually characterized by thorns. For most varieites, their lovliness is accompanied by offensive and injurious thorns.

Relationships are a lot like roses in this regard. You have to watch the thorns! As long as you just look from a distance, the thorns pose no threat, nor do they become personal. But if you want to get close enough to touch, to embrace, to scrutinize, thorns are a part.

Rose thorns are not rational or logical. They do not intentionally choose to cause pain or injury - but they do just because their space is invaded.

To have a rose is to require carefulness, sensitivity, tenderness, and a soft touch. He who tries to brusquely grasp a rose will loose every time. They must be held carefully. Relationships are a lot like this.There are "barbs" in all of us that offend those with whom we realate, and we are unaware of most of them.

Obviously we are different from roses, though, in that we can learn what offends and hurts, and either eliminate, or at least, minimize them. Here is a crusade for us. Blunt the barbs.