THE BEAUTY OF A COMMONPLACE LIFE

F.W. Boreham (1871 - 1959), in his essay entitled "The Poppies And The Corn", talks about time he was walking through one of the farms in England and he saw this beautiful scene of poppies dancing amidst the ears of corn . . . . . .

"There is a very lovable thing about poppies in the corn that I can never sufficiently admire. The poppies never belittle the corn, they glorify it. You'd think not the less but the more of the corn because of the poppies. At a rose show, one particularly radiant blossom puts all the surrounding roses to shame. They are beggared by comparison. That is because a show is all artificiality and affectation. Nature never humiliates her more modest children in that ridiculous way. As you watch the blood red poppies tossing in a sea of golden corn, it never occurs to you to institute a comparison. The poppies and the corn seem equally lovely. That is the glory of true greatness. Others are never humiliated in its presence. It elevates the mass. If a field were all poppies, the glory would have departed. The poppies need the corn. God makes nothing commonplace. Here is a gospel for those to whom the days seem grey because they have given up dreaming of poppies".


“A commonplace life, we say and we sigh,

But why should we sigh as we say?

The commonplace sun and the commonplace sky

Makes up the commonplace day.

The moon and the stars are commonplace things,

And the flower that blooms and the bird that sings;

But dark were the world and sad our lot,

If the flowers failed and the sun shone not.

And God who studies each separate soul

Out of the commonplace lives makes His beautiful whole.”

Anonymous


I heard all this in a sermon by Ravi Zacharias but could not find F.W. Boreham's essay "The Poppies And The Corn" on the internet, so I have used Ravi's words verbatim. He also read out the anonymous poem "A Commonplace Life" which I subsequently copied from the net.

Picture : Some sort of fir/conifer/pine; taken in Beihai Park, Beijing, near the 9 Dragon Screen. Picture taken by Robyn, May 2011.