Early in our marriage my husband started a tradition of sending me half a dozen roses at random times. He would occasionally send other flowers as well like a bouquet of fall or spring flowers but it was always more special when I got the roses because of the color. When he sent roses, there were always five red roses along the outside of the vase and one white rose right in the middle. Swoon, right?! The only problem was he would never tell me what it meant! Everyone knows that rose colors have meaning so I thought surely there had to be some significance to this beautiful arrangement he so lovingly picked just for me. My sweetheart apparently decided the mystery was more fun than the meaning and has kept it to himself for seventeen years! In Victorian times ladies wouldn’t have this problem. When a man was courting a woman he presented her with a tussy mussy which is a bouquet of flowers in a cone shaped holder. The ladies had little flower books that told them what the colors of the flowers meant. If a man presented a lady with red flowers it would mean that he loved her passionately but if he presented her with yellow flowers it meant that he thought of her fondly as a friend. I can just imagine how exciting it would have been to get a tussy mussy filled with multiple colors of flowers. It would be like decoding a secret message looking up each color and putting it all together to see how that special someone was feeling about you that day. Dating is certainly different today than it was in Victorian times, however we are all still courted by God. He longs to have a relationship with each of us. And if He were courting us like they did in Victorian times, he would show up at our front door step with a beautiful tussy mussy adorned with lace and ribbons in all of our favorite colors and there would be multiple colored flowers. We would look up the colors one by one but not in a flower book, we would look up each color in God’s very own Word and find that the red flowers stand for love because God loves us so much that He sent His one and only Son to die for us, to atone for our sins and restore us into a relationship with Him (John 3:16). There would be a white flower to stand for Hope because Jesus is our hope and he anchors us to God (Hebrews 6:19) There would be a pink flower to represent grace so that we know that His grace is sufficient for us and His power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). We would have greenery in our bouquet because greenery represents new life and when we come to Christ, we are a new creation, the old is gone (2 Corinthians 5:17). Pops of yellow would infuse our bouquet to fill us with joy as we trust in Him (Romans 15:13). God would fill our tussy mussy with blue flowers of peace (John 14:27). The purple flowers would tell us of our royalty as 1 Peter 2:9 says, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praise of Him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” Finally, we would get an orange flower to remind us to be thankful because he wants us to have hearts full of gratitude for all that he is and all that he’s done (Psalm 107:1). Talk about swoon worthy! That would be a tussy mussy worth posting on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram! We may not have the bouquets in our hands but we do have the assurance that God is courting each of us every day. Even without the flowers, the words still remain in God’s very own book written by Him for us, and His word is more beautiful than any flower you could ever imagine. By the way, if you talk to my husband, see if you can get the mystery of the roses out of him and give me a call!
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