I was thinking of dandelions as I was mowing the other day. The yellow flowers can be such an annoyance as we attempt to create beautiful well-kept yards. We mow and the very next day they are rearing their little heads popping up one at a time until your yard is filled with those little yellow buds.
Each year my husband sprays our yard for dandelions so we only have a few weeks of the yellow flowers and then they become flower-shaped molds of white seeds that are shriveled creations in our yard. And obviously, eventually die out.
I remember when my girls were little, they would bring those yellow flowers by the fistfuls to me with their sweet little faces and dirty hands and proclaim with those big brown eyes, “I brought you some flowers, mommy!” How many small jars full of those pesky dandelions did I have over the years!! 
But I cherish those times of my sink lined with those jars. I wouldn’t trade the excitement on those little girls’ faces for anything when they believed they had found a treasure.
After the dandelions had gone through their season of bloom, we would sit in the yard and pull up the white-seeded flowers and blow those little seeds to see how far they would fly. Sometimes my girls and I would make a wish and then blow on the flower to see our wishes fade into the wind to create seeds of magic. 
I look at those dandelions like our lives. We can choose to focus on how annoying our problems are; how circumstances in our lives are not the way we wish they were; how we “fix” one problem and then another one pops up; OR we can look at our life situation and see the pretty “dandelion” as a gift from God. We can see the blessing in living through the trials until they fade away and we can blow the seeds of kindness into the wind and help others because of the trials we have overcome.
The next time you go through a trial or find something in your life that is just plain annoying, think about a sweet little pesky dandelion. They may crop up and ruin the look of your yard or your life, but in the end God is handing us a fistful of blessings that with just the right attitude, we may choose to put in a jar of water and just enjoy the season.
