In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Alice comes across three playing cards are painting white roses red. Our curiouser and curiouser heroine, who no matter what she happens across in Wonderland cannot contain her curiosity, asks them what they are doing.
They explain they have planted a white rose tree where there ought to have been a red rose tree and they are trying to cover up for their mistakes by painting the white roses red.
These hapless, mistake-prone, animated playing cards (having also brought the cook turnip bulbs when asked for onions) live in constant fear of their overbearing employer, the Queen of Hearts, who demands perfection at the highest price. One slight mistake and it’s off with your head!
In the classic Disney version of this movie, Alice joins in alongside the cards and begins painting too, happy to assist in fixing their mistakes, putting herself in the path of the Queen of Heart’s destructive wrath.
There have been many times in my life when I have known for sure that I should have taken my life another direction. I shouldn’t have done this, or spent money on that, or let that opportunity pass me by. And for years I struggled with horrific envy of other people’s lives; my friends with published books, nice houses, successful careers. The ones who traveled extensively got to me the most. Comparison absolutely devastated me. What if I had waited to get married? What if I had majored in another degree? What if I had taken another job? What if I had just moved to New York City just for the heck of it?
And we sit there, staring at our white roses, wishing they were red. Or worse, we spend our time and energy desperately trying to paint our white roses red to the chagrin of our angry inner Queen of Hearts, feeling unfulfilled unless we can get things EXACTLY the way we want them.
I can’t speak as to Arminianism or Calvinism, as I have always found that debate rather dull and pedantic; as if Christians are always trying to put all of God’s eggs into one basket. Whether God intended us to have red roses all along or if He is amusedly watching us to see which color roses we end up with or if He knows they were always going to be white anyway — I don’t know.
But I know God is not the Queen of Hearts. He isn’t obsessive over the details of our roses, and is just glad we took the time to plant and tend to something beautiful in our lives. He finds usefulness and wonder and glory in all colors of roses, or even weeds.
So instead of trying to fixate on our mistakes or spending our lives wondering what could have been, we should instead enjoy the fruits of our labor and fall in love with the color of roses we already have planted. Because while we might have preferred red roses, there is someone out there who would have loved to have our white roses. How much effort have we put in our lives trying to rake over the coals of our past while completely ignoring the future, or worse, the present?
You can’t change what you did in the past and you will always have the consequences of your decisions, good or bad, following you throughout your life. But instead of trying to paint over our mistakes, maybe it’s best we just try to appreciate the beauty we do have, today. As the Bard stated, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It’s time to stop and smell the roses — whether they’re red OR white.
jennifercmartin 