Our Story

When peo­ple realise that we are two sis­ters work­ing together, they often ask “who is Lily and who is Rose?”

The name Lily&Rose was born from a bless­ing from the hand and heart of God. Its true pur­pose is to bring glory to God and Him alone. Through Him all things are possible…

The past three years has been very trau­matic in my (Ninene’s) life. In a mat­ter of a week, I went from per­fectly healthy (but a bit over­weight) to being diag­nosed with ovar­ian can­cer. With surgery, every can­cer­ous cell was removed, but I still had to deal with chemo ther­apy and all its side effects. One evening, sit­ting on my bed and read­ing from my Bible, I was look­ing for answers and won­dered if I was going to die? I had a lot of ques­tions! Our amaz­ing, liv­ing God answered me from Isa­iah 46:4 “Even to your old age I am He, and even to hair white with age I will carry you and save you.” (Ampli­fied Bible)

I took this promise to heart and made it my own. With a pos­i­tive atti­tude I tack­led chemo, sur­vived can­cer, are cured and liv­ing, to bring glory to God. The road trav­elled was hard but the jour­ney, unbe­liev­ably amaz­ing! I met the most won­der­ful peo­ple along the way. I have often said they are angels, you just don’t see their wings.

Soon I was in for another trau­matic expe­ri­ence.  A month and a half after fin­ish­ing my final chemo ses­sion, my hus­band, com­ing home from work one evening, lost his life in a hor­rific car acci­dent. With my mind still bog­gled from  chemo and not able to func­tion 100%, I again had to fully rely on God.

While sleep­ing one night, I woke to the incred­i­ble fra­grance of flow­ers right under my nose. With my spir­i­tual eyes, I saw pur­ple flow­ers of all kinds, in absolute abun­dance! As I became awake, I remem­ber try­ing to inhale the fra­grance so deep until it filled my every being.  For two years I had no expla­na­tion as to this event.

One evening in Feb­ru­ary of 2011, a lady came to my home­town min­is­ter­ing about the botan­ics of the Bible.  At one stage she said  “ … and some­times Jesus vis­its us in a fra­grance.”  Sud­denly the light went on for me and I realised what had hap­pened.  Jesus came to visit me – how incred­i­bly pre­cious and spoilt I felt!  I ran to Eunice, explained my expe­ri­ence and told her of my husband’s pass­ing, never mak­ing men­tion of the can­cer.  I couldn’t wait to go and smell all the spe­cial oils (the Bible’s botan­i­cals).  Some stank, oth­ers were bet­ter.  After try­ing a few I took one and yes, it smelled like flow­ers, but not the same as in my ‘dream’.  I must’ve put a sec­ond oil on top of the pre­vi­ous one and that’s when I smelled it.  Voila!  It was the exact same fra­grance I woke up to that night.

One was Lily of the Val­ley, and the other one Rose of Sharon.  Songs of Solomon 2:1 – “I am a meadow flower (Rose) from Sharon, a lily from the val­leys.  The Lover to his Beloved”.  The Ampli­fied puts it like this: “I am only a lit­tle rose or autumn cro­cus of the plain of Sharon, or a [hum­ble] lily of the val­leys [that grows in deep and dif­fi­cult places].”  Eunice explained it like this:

• The Rose grows in the desert with­out peo­ple tak­ing care of it or water­ing it, yet it flow­ers abun­dantly and is beautiful.
• Lily of the val­ley grows in the deep­est, dark­est of places.  It is the purest of all the white flow­ers; it’s bowed head a sym­bol of hum­ble­ness.  The flow­ers have 7 (God’s per­fect num­ber) sta­mens, all gold (again Godly) in colour.

This was where I was in my life – the dri­est desert and the deep­est dark­est val­ley.  That night a proph­esy came to me from God:  this time (the trauma of the past two years) has come to pass; this is the begin­ning of a new sea­son and of new things; the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the flow­ers will become yours tonight.

After recov­er­ing com­pletely I decided to start dec­o­rat­ing again (my true pas­sion).  One day, after hav­ing walked around with the idea of the two of us work­ing together for some time, I pitched the idea to Irma.  Irma had toyed with the idea of a career change for a while and had thought along the same lines.  Unbe­knownst to me she had received Word a day or two before which con­firmed it for us: “Two are bet­ter than one because they have good return from their work” – Eccle­si­astes 4:9.  We’ve always worked well together and cre­atively we ‘see the same pic­ture’.  Every­thing fell into place like the pieces of a puz­zle – cre­ativ­ity, finan­cial and IT knowledge.

And so the Word kept flow­ing for many days after­wards, but I will let Irma tell you about that later.

Today we are liv­ing the mir­a­cle, work­ing in the bless­ing and the promise.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to
pros­per you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” – Jere­miah 29:11

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia