debbie mendoza

For years, I was haunted by a sense of déjà vu whenever my eye would catch a certain shade of red, orange, or yellow. I say haunted, because something about them hinted at a previous experience maybe to be repeated in the future. It was a state of mind, an altered consciousness. I would close my eyes when I felt it coming on, but it would go by me in a flash. It left a bright color in its wake and a memory just out of my reach.

Then, one day, on the Internet, I came across a picture of a plant in full bloom, with flowers at the same time simple, abundant, and wild. Years of closing my eyes to catch the flash before it was gone melded with the picture before me. There was instant recognition! The Pride of Barbados! The flash had kept coming because it had dotted my life in bits and spurts.

A few months later, on a visit to our family home, the real deal jumped out at me from across the street. It had been there for as long as I could remember, but I had forgotten! Small but bushy, abundant, and scarcely tamed, the reds, yellows, and oranges felt like they were imposing themselves on me. I stared and finally understood.

The Pride of Barbados had been part of my everyday life as a teenager but I never really paid attention to it. Just like a design on the corner of a picture frame, this flowering plant had formed part of the frame of my adolescent experiences. The extravagance of colors fit into the upper left hand corner of the frame whenever I left the house, and the upper right hand corner whenever I came back home.

Unassuming but bold, colorful but quiet, it appeared to be just another burst of color among so many others in Belize. These contrasts somehow would not be ignored by my subconscious, and they buried themselves in a long-forgotten pocket in my bag of teenage memories. They would peep out whenever something vaguely resembling their richness came my way, throwing me into déjà vu.

With this new understanding of why the colors had affected me for so many years, I stood and stared at the Pride of Barbados, all the pieces of flash falling into place.

Staring at it, I realized that we often ignore or forget the good, the simple, and the beautiful. With the silliest of grins on my face, I thanked God that He had given me eyes to see and record the beauty of His creation. I was grateful that the proud burst of color that is this flower, was a staunch reminder that He was always there with me as I grew up in this house. His creation was doing its work of declaring His goodness to me every time I walked in or out of that yard for the many years we lived in that house. And subconsciously, I received and held on to that message.

Now, I notice the Pride of Barbados wherever I see it. It always makes me smile. His creation is like hope: we carry it often without even realizing that it’s there in our hearts. Like a flash, we get glimpses of the real thing, knowing we’ve experienced it before and hoping that it will come to us again, in all its promise, in the future.

What is your story in which a particular aspect of creation reminds you of God’s constant presence? I would love to hear it!

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. Ps 19:1-4

© Debbie Mendoza, Updated January 2024 (Originally written 2011)