Well my poppy garden was a complete failure I have never been able to grow poppies, the many times I have tried to chickens scratched them out or they just get stolen from church.
Apparently poppies need to be sown in battlefields that have seen plenty of blood and guts.
Or blood and bone.
But I have red pineapple sage and red dahlias and a red canna lily, plus amaranth that is poetically named love-lies-bleeding. I also have, although not the season for it now, a red chinese lantern that droops it's blossoms in a sorrowful manner.
I had been thinking of war memorials lately and how great a cost it was for those soldiers to lay down their lives for us. They went knowing they were going to die, they didn't stand a chance. Will we forget that? Maybe if you weren't related to anyone in Gallipoli perhaps it doesn't mean a lot to you. But there's a loved one everyone can remember every Sunday of a great battle between good and evil when our Saviour laid down his life for us. He went to the cross, knowing his death meant life for us. He could have saved his own life but he willingly sacrificed his own life, for all mankind. He was young, only 33. He didn't have any children. He was fit and healthy. He could have lived a long life on earth and done so much more.
But such was his trust in the One who could raise him from the dead, that his death was not in vain. And because he did that, those that believe and love God are not dead in vain either. So death where is thy sting?
So as we walk through the gardens and cemeteries with poppies at our feet (or other flowers, because poppies only bloom in November) and munch our Anzac biscuits meditate on Romans 8:35-39
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, for thy sake we are killed all the day long, we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God , which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
