Rescue and Rebirth - Journeys of a Purple Plant

Today it has been beautiful outside, the way summer should be, so I spent a good deal of time enjoying it by puttering around doing some outside chores. One of those was to repot my two purple plants (whose proper name I have not yet discovered), and to plant another one that had grown roots from a cutting.
This plant is amazing, and it is almost like a pet to me. I say this plant, because it did originally start as a singular entity.
Once upon a time, long, long ago –I think it was about 2002- I noticed a very attractive “volunteer” plant that had sprung up in the pot of my mom’s Gingko tree. I wasn’t sure if it was a weed or something that had snuck into the soil when the tree was elsewhere, but I decided to rescue it and transplant it to its own pot and save it from eventually being weeded. It was a spiky, fuzzy-leaved plant, that turned a deep purple when it got enough sunshine, and eventually it grew longer into stalks that would reach toward the sun as if to embrace it. When a stalk was mature, it would grow a tip that would flower with delicate pink petals; the flowers would each last only a day, but soon another would bloom from the tip, sometimes even two at once.
The Purple Plant went with me to college (sophomore year, I think) and adorned my windowsill, unhappily turning pale green in the winter but reviving again in the spring. It lived with me through two years of dorm rooms, a summer in a duplex, and a year in a very dark and very old apartment. After graduation, it went with me for the summer to my sister’s house, where it almost met an untimely end. Fortunately, it proved hard to kill, and a sunny spot in my classroom (once I got a job and moved) helped it to recover. It has now passed two years with me in that post as well.
Last year, it was flourishing by summertime and needed a bigger pot. As the stalks got longer, they were prone to break off more easily; it was by saving those broken stalks and sticking them in water-bottles that I discovered how easily this plant could be grown from starts/cuttings. Thus, when I repotted it, the Purple Plant also had a younger clone of itself in a smaller pot.
This brings us to today, when I planned to repot the two and plant a third. The leaves had been turning pale and limp at an alarming rate, and I was hoping a change of soil and perhaps change of location would revive it. But alas! When I removed the plants from the pots, I discovered that some nasty bug had infested the soil, leaving behind caches of eggs amongst the roots. After analyzing the situation, it seemed to me that the best way to rescue my dear Purple Plant, was to amputate. Into two vases and a pitcher went selected cuttings, as I clipped the most promising stalks and removed dead leaves, hoping to give these pieces of the original a second chance at life. I potted Purple Plant the Third, now that its vase was full of its ancestors/cousins from Purple Plant I and Purple Plant II, preparing to grow new roots. Soon, I won’t be able to tell anymore which came from which; the roots will intertwine within each vase, each stalk becoming part of a larger family once again, and I will plant them into whatever pot they fit best. It will be my dear Purple Plant again, all four or six or eight of it! More to love…

It got me to thinking, while clipping new starts and throwing away the diseased roots, I did this all on good faith that the starts will take root and I will have saved the plant essentially by killing it. This is what it must be like for people with cancer, or who need an organ transplant: they kill off part of their body in hopes that the new bone marrow, or kidney, or whatever it is, will take hold in time to save them from completely dying away.
Sacrifice…Rescue…Rebirth…New Life.
I can’t help but draw a parallel to the Christian life. We humans are like this Purple Plant: beautiful, but slowly dying as we are eaten away inside by a multitude of infestations. A new body won’t save us, nor will a new place to live, a new job…if we are re-potted, we’ll still carry the disease with us. “Save us!” we must cry to the Gardener, who comes with the pruning shears. It may hurt, being cut away from our roots, our human nature, our eternal disease. But ah! Here we are in fresh water, free from those old infected roots, free to put out new ones and have a second chance at life. Sure, we’re still part of the same plant, and will be prone to get infected again, but we’ve been reborn! Someone else was sacrificed, thrown into the rubbish heap like old infected roots, so that we could have a second chance at life; a new kind of life, one that will last like a Purple Plant flowering forever under the tender care of a Master Gardener.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come…” -2 Corinthians 5:17

“Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” –Romans 5:18-19