The Rev Lezley Stewart considers the lessons to be learned from wild overgrown spaces.

AT this time of year one of the things I enjoy is seeing wild flowers growing all around.

The spread of poppies in a local meadow always makes me stop and smile and the bog cotton swaying in the breeze on a local moorland is a thing of beauty.

When the wind catches the cotton it seems to dance with great abandon, providing glints of white on an otherwise barren landscape.

Perhaps it is because I am no gardener that I love wild flowers so much.

I’m the sort of person that will leave cutting the grass a little while longer because I like the daisies, buttercups and dandelions. I like to sit in the back garden and watch the bees clambering all over them, collecting their pollen, before they move on to find their next fix.

There is a beauty and fragility in wildflowers and in the places they often grow.

Near where I live there is a derelict site on the edge of the village.

Old industrial buildings are now crumbling, but all around is spread the colours of the rainbow – red, yellow, purple, green, blue – poppies, foxgloves, thistles, bluebells, honeysuckle and others I can’t name.

A space that might otherwise be considered an eyesore not only offers a kaleidoscope to the human eye, but provides a great habitat for bees and other insects to thrive – butterflies, dragonflies, ladybirds and the like.

Sometimes we live in very ordered spaces, with regimented patterns and lives that are seemingly expected to fit into a particular mould.

Sometimes the church can feel like that too – where there is no room to be different, to be wild, to be colourful and free. Beauty is not always detected in the unusual, the different and the uncontrolled.

When Jesus encouraged his disciples to “consider the lilies of the field and how they grow” [Matthew 6:28] he was pointing to the landscape around to teach something of God’s transformative ways. Jesus sought to stretch the imagination of his disciples in considering the wildness of God’s mercy, and in seeking the wisdom of the kingdom.

Today, in much the same way, the landscape around can open our minds to the ways of Christ – to consider what we have to learn about the diversity and fragility of life, and what we can learn from the wilderness and the wild spaces where beauty yet thrives.

Perhaps the wild flowers that dot the landscape of our beautiful country this summer can serve as a reminder that life can flourish in the barren wastelands, in the dark nooks and crannies, and can even survive the trampling of our feet.

Life flourishes when we least try to control the Spirit of God, for God is always cultivating and creating and encouraging us to move into spaces of growth and places of vibrancy. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. (From The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry)

“Today… the landscape around can open our minds to the ways of Christ – to consider what we have to learn about the diversity and fragility of life, and what we can learn from the wilderness and the wild spaces where beauty yet thrives.

The Rev Lezley Stewart is Associate Minister at Edinburgh: Greyfriars Kirk.