I have been thinking about seeds a lot this year.
I lay in bed pondering seeds because up until now, I have not fully appreciated the power of a seed. It was my granddaughter who taught me why I need to think about seeds and soil and water and sunlight a lot more than I do:
One Sunday morning, the two of us were home together. I asked her if she’d like to teach me the Sunday School lesson that day.
She opened to a scripture from the devotional reading her family had been doing:
“But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.”
2 Corinthians 9:6
And then she asked me what “sparingly” meant. That’s an easy enough question, but I didn’t have a ready answer, so instead, I reached across the counter where we were sitting. There sat a honeydew melon (her favorite). A neighbor had delivered it the night before from his overabundant garden harvest. We cut it in half, and then we started counting the seeds. We stopped after 100, with more than half the melon to go.
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
I said, “If we went out and planted these 200 seeds, that would be sowing bountifully. But if we only planted one, that would be sowing sparingly. If we plant just one tiny seed, we might only get six more honeydew melons. And then she said something profound: But they would each have more seeds inside them like this one does.”
My mind was stuck on taking a seed and making it grow something. She saw the real message: If we planted even one of the 200 seeds and grew more fruit, we would eventually have more honeydew melons than we could ever eat and enjoy ourselves.
Later, when I was discussing this conversation with a daughter-in-law, she observed, “God’s ability to provide us with seed is exponential, isn’t it?” Whatever we begin with or grow from seed only requires a seed to start. The potential of one good seed is essentially infinite.
I’m still pondering this almost a year later. And it has changed the way I think about everything.
