When I was younger, I absolutely hated flowers. They smelt weird, they always brought bugs, and they died easily. I was in an emo phase.

As I grew older, I started to appreciate the beauty. It was my senior year of high school and I went on a college visit to the University of Georgia (go dawgs). The tour guide was quirky and cute and really reminded me of myself in a non-braggy way. She brought the group of high schoolers to a small patch of flowers. It was a beautiful setting, which I later found out in my freshman year of college at UGA was North Campus, on Herty Field. She looked at these flowers and said something that I never forgot.

"Don't forget to grow where you're planted."

That was my motto for the rest of high school senior year. No matter what happened, I always remembered where my feet were and how to be happy at that moment. My favorite thing about that quote is that it can be taken so many different ways. It can be a "stop and smell the roses" (ha flower pun), or something as different as "even in these circumstances, you can rise". It's so universal, yet personal.

Freshman year of college was definitely two very different seasons of life for me. For the first time in my life, I was physically free to do whatever I wanted. Mentally, I was the complete opposite of free. I was enslaved by my terrible mental health. 2019 has been really trying for me, but these flower reminders still come to mind. Grow where I'm planted. Just because I have bad days, doesn't mean I can't have happiness. Days, hours, minutes, seconds. Every second matters when you have to count them to stay sane. Another quote comes to mind when thinking about bad days.

"Sometimes when you're in a dark place, you think you've been buried, but you've actually been planted." -Christine Caine

Even seeds have to live in darkness before breaking through into the light and becoming what they were meant to be. I love that thought because it shows that good times cannot come before dark times. In a way, you should be excited to go through the dark time because the light is coming your way. Of course, it could be ways away, but it's still there.

"I asked God to help me grow, and it started raining."

We cannot change without going through changes. God will take things away and bring things in to help that process. We need rain to grow. We need that trial and hardship to create strength, and it grows our minds and bodies. A prayer I find myself praying quite frequently is something along the lines of "God, please give me peace". In order to give me peace, the thing causing me not to have peace must be taken out. I don't want that thing to leave, but I must in order to move past it and have peace. We cannot pray and expect change without going through the process of those changes.

"Perhaps the reason you are drawn to flowers is not only for their outer beauty, but because they remind you beautiful things will bloom after the longest seasons of waiting." -Morgan Harper Nichols