Fading and Failing Flowers

We have high ambitions of teaching our six children to answer the phone correctly

"Hello, this is the ______residence, _______ speaking."

We also have high ambitions for our children to take detailed

messages and deliver them in person with a smile.

We grill drill them on phone etiquette over and over,

cautioning about things like mouth full of marbles,

and mumbling like a teenager.

To help make message taking easier,

I found a vintage tin for paper and my daughters made cute flower pens.

Nobody should have had an excuse not to take a good message.

The problem is,

the pens ran out of ink at least two, maybe three, years ago,

and I kept running out of paper.

It became a simple project I kept putting off.

The phone messages ended up being scratched onto

random pieces of mail, napkins, receipts or any stray

piece of paper within grabbing distance of the phone.

Of course, I mean scratched,

cuz when all the pens were out of ink,

you really were scratching.

It made the ol' Abe Lincoln scratching out his math homework

on the shovel with a piece of coal,

look pretty high tech.

I just had to remember to buy a new pack of pens,

and unwrap the old pens,

saving the flowers and the leaves.

You cut off the flower stem,

leaving an inch of wire.

Using about 4-5 inches of floral tape,

you wind enough just to secure the flower to the pen.

The leaves are added a little further down from the top

then you continue winding all the way to the end.

Jon jumped in and helped finish the project in minutes.

They were finished so quickly,

I couldn't figure out why I put it off for years.

Wouldn't you know, the phone rang,

just in time for Jon to test his creations?

I saved all the bad copies from the copying machine

and cut them to fit into the old caramel can.

Handy, useful, but still vintagy and cute.

And flowers are always a great spiritual reminder -

Isaiah 40:8

The grass withers, the flower fades:

but the Word of our God shall stand for ever.

The Word of God also lasts longer than homemade flower pens.