Alabama

 

Matt 22:39   The second most important commandment is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’

 

 

“…by Gods help I am going to try and make the world better and brighter by my being here…”  reads an excerpt from a letter written in 1892 by Walter Bellingrath, founder of Bellingrath Gardens in Theodore , Alabama.

Originally 60 acres of swamp land south of Mobile, Bellingrath Gardens and home are now a showplace of eye-popping color-filled magnificence displayed both in the gardens and in  the home.

Mr. Bellingrath grew up from modest means to become the first bottler of Coca-Cola in Alabama, and acquired wealth beyond imagination, but never deemed it his alone to enjoy. He spent a life time preparing his beloved gardens for friends and neighbors to see.

          His wife, Bessie Morse, who at one time was his stenographer at the Coca-Cola plant, had no less of a desire to help those around her. In the depths of the depression she might be seen driving up to a shack of a downtrodden family and sending her driver to the door to see if the owner might sell her some obscure shrub for three or four hundred dollars, just so she could put it in “just a perfect spot” in her gardens.” Thus the family would both be helped and their dignity left in tack.

     Could God, do you suppose, have had any less of a mission for you and I? Certainly He never blessed you or I with a Coca-Cola fortune, but then, He never asked us to buy a $300 shrub.

            But He has asked us to give freely of the things He has given us: love, grace, forgiveness and a life filled up.  Share me, Oh Lord, as freely as you have shared yourself.

And, as Mr. B said, “..may we make the world better and brighter by our being here…”