The Purple Flower and the Art of Letting Go

“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” — Matthew 6:33–34

My mother didn’t just read those words. She lived her life practicing them. Today, I’ll share with you my mother’s lifelong surrender to God’s will and what she taught me about waiting and trusting.

One afternoon, sitting with her in the den, I noticed her staring at me. When I started to speak, she laughed and said, “I can’t help looking at your face—it looks like you have a purple flower on your nose.” I checked the mirror for a smudge, found nothing, and came back laughing. “That’s a good title for a poem or something,” I told her. “I’m going to write about that one day.”

I kept that promise. Purple Flower on My Nose is the story of the twenty-six days my sister and I moved back home to care for our mother, Violet, during home hospice—but really, it is the story of a lifetime of holy surrender and what it taught me about trusting God’s will when nothing makes sense.

My mother had a feeding tube for over thirty years. She could drink liquids that moved under gravity, but never could eat food. She traveled to Lourdes in the hope of finding a cure. Instead, she came home saying Jesus had told her the feeding tube was His gift to her. And she accepted it — never grumbling while the rest of us enjoyed our meals, never asking why. In the hospital, near the end, she said simply, “Jesus suffered for me. I can suffer for Him.”

That is what surrender looked like to her: not defeat, not resignation, but friendship with God so deep that even suffering became something to offer back to Him. When anyone admired her faith and positive attitude, she would wave it off: “It’s not me, it’s the Lord in me.”

My own surrender came harder. During those home hospice days, I wrote in my journal through tears: I believe, I trust—I just don’t understand or know, and so I wait. This limbo is a mystery, but Jesus, I do trust in you. I learned that trust is not the absence of questions. It is choosing to wait on God, even when questions remain unanswered.

And here is the surprising truth: surrender did not make those days grim. It made them holy—and even joyful. My mother told us, “You have to laugh even when you are dying,” and we did. Amidst the heavy sorrow of anticipation, my sisters and I laughed with her. In her final days, drinking tea from a dropper, she whispered, “I am so happy.”

Happy. Dying, and happy. That is the fruit of her life spent seeking first the kingdom—and she did so in her child-like, trusting faith.

If you are in your own season of waiting—a diagnosis, a loss, a limbo you didn’t choose—please know that surrender is not giving up. It is going through even when you don’t understand. It is trusting that the One who sees tomorrow loves you enough to sustain and hold you through today.

My mother’s name was Violet. The purple flower she saw on my nose was, I think, her way of leaving herself with me. This is me, writing about it—just as I promised her I would one day.

Edited by Gabriella Batel

Picture credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay