Lilacs used to be my favorite. For both the looks and the smell. But since I got saved, rose. There was a season, when I was recently saved, that things got tough spiritually with a lot of battle and I was very stressed out and sad. So on one such day I took a walk and as I was going down the road, I was pretty stressed out so I didn't look around me nor did I see anything, I prayed to God for comfort and just as I finished, in that same moment I looked up, and wow, there stood a rose within my reach, right in front of my eyes, growing among weeds. It was just a neglected lot and weeds everywhere and it grew right outside the chain-link fence. I started turning around wondering where did it come from when there were no roses nearby, and how it was right in front of me when I looked up. Looking for the explanation to the situation, but the situation was a tiny miracle... I asked God to comfort me, right? And I lift my eyes and it's right there. It was crazy. It was on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, a single rose, my favorite shade, and the bud was about to start opening. Perfect and ready for picking. A rose for me... from Jesus...??? It's hard to describe what I felt in that moment. I was ravished by the love of God... I knew then that I belonged to Jesus that He chose me to be His disciple and He watched over me... I could almost see Him on a white horse, shining in His glory like a golden sun...
It so happened that I wore a white hoodie that day, and it had the words "Universal Master" written on it, I didn't deliberately choose it, I've just never paid attention what it said until then. But it was so fitting for the day. I picked the rose, and it felt like my feet weren't touching the ground on my way home. I dried it and kept for almost a decade but it fell apart and crumbled, since I was clueless on how to properly preserve flowers. I comforted myself, that it was never about the object, of course. It was about treasuring the memory of the event. I still have a lot of pictures from that day.
There is one more reason why I love roses. Because my favorite human also loved them. My grandma cut all her roses when I was small, so I don't fall into thorns. And she loved roses so much, but still cut them off. They grew back again later, but there were nothing like they used to be before. That's also something I'll treasure as long as I live. She died last year.
There's something about the rose. You can't top a single rose with any other flower. You just can't.