"OCOTILLO JESUS" LIVES

        My Arizona cactus garden contains two dozen or more odd plants, and none is odder than the ocotillo (oh-koh-TEE-yoh). Where most varieties have verdant green pads or barrel heads or arms growing skyward, the ocotillo is an ugly bunch of sticks mostly barren of foliage and vicious to touch. 

        Like most cacti, ocotillo can be started by planting a piece in the ground. Soon it makes its own roots and grows a few inches each season. A year ago I planted a two foot ocotillo stick on the edge of my garden and when I returned in six months it had grown an inch and had small green round leaves. 

        But soon those leaves dried up, fell off and it looked dead all winter. Then a slow all-night rain brought it back to life. Within days new tiny green round leaves began to adorn its thorny branch again. Soon it’ll have a glob of red-orange flowers on the tip which will add another inch or two to its length. Maybe in a year another ugly branch will be added and all will lose their leaves as the plant “dies” again until the next rain.

        Only rain water can make it come back to life. The lowly ocotillo needs nutrients from the air in the heavens to make it leaf and blossom. It will never look fresh like the prickly pear or stately like the organ pipe, but its flowers are as lovely as the fuscia, yellow and gold of ground cacti or the deep red and pure white of the night bloomers. Its spiny crooked sticks are among the ugliest in nature, but it lives and blooms by the grace of God.

        It’s somewhat like our Lord Jesus. He was an oddity, living a short life, confounding those who heard Him. His spiny comments aggravated the authorities, and His miracles dazzled the meek and poor as He told them He was the Living Water of God on earth. 

        Isaiah 53:2 tells us, “He grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” 

        Like a stick planted into the earth, Jesus bloomed awhile, dried up and died, then came back to life in glory everlasting. Because Jesus is Lord over all creation, all who trust in Him also shall rise, forever to be with Him in glory indescribable and words inexpressible. 

“Ocotillo Jesus” lives forever.

Rev. Bob Tasler, www.bobtasler.com