Blog 691 – 07.12.2017
(Excerpt from the book, Emily – The Little Girl Who Sang Her Song To Anyone Who Came Along)
Episode 12

Emily was a beautiful little girl and like most girls she wanted to be a beautiful woman but her gift was not to be a physical beauty but a beauty of spirit far more lasting and moving.

By middle school she had begun to accept that she would not have a Barbie doll figure nor be asked to be a cheerleader but Emily could sing and the girl knew how to wear a hat and move an audience.

She wowed them at the Murchison Middle School in Austin, Texas with her rendition of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand’s Second Hand Rose of Second Avenue. They loved her song and started calling her Rose.

An Emily by any other name would smell as sweet and sing like the angel she was and is. No second hand Rose to be sure but first rate in all things. That is who she was and will always be.

I have written in one of my blogs about a poem by Helen Steiner Rice that I read as a young man. The poem begins, “God has not promised skies always blue, flower strewn pathways all our lives through…” The poem goes on to tell all the things that the author believes are more important that God has promised. But I love flowers, Jesus loved flowers, God loves flowers. And my path way has been strewn with flowers all my life through. One of those flowers was Emily and for thirty two years she opened her sweet smiling face like a lovely rose for all to see the reflection of her true Father, God, the Universe. I was just Emily’s dad but I am so grateful I got to play that role.

The reason I wrote this book was not to glorify the love of a dad for his little girl nor even really to say that Emily was more special that any other daddy’s little girl but to share a Secret. Namely that we are each and everyone of us beautiful flowers in God’s rose garden, magnificent beings awakening to our highest potential. Jesus did, Emily did. Each of us can too. Awake oh sleeping flower and let it dawn on you Who and Whose you truly are. You are loved for you are Love.

Your friend and fellow traveler, Emily’s Dad,
David White