Planting Seed

There is a faithful couple that has lived down the road for over thirty years, watering their expansive gardens in front of the same field for decades of summers— the only house they’ve ever owned in this town.
We all spent Easter there at that same house, too, that place proving both a family and a home for us now. And after all the praise and rejoicing at the little white church, we blessed our sacred feast looking out at the rain-drenched flatlands that have softened to bogs.
We prayed for resurrection in that house: in us, in this earth.
We prayed for floods of life and mercy in the midst of sopping uncertainty and delay.

And so a few weeks later, I leaned in close when they told me about the plows rolling out in the fields right over the cracked and toppled cornstalks from last harvest; how the drills plunged the new seed in deep, right between the leftovers, the soil now just less soaked than mud.

“There is no time to plow or till this year,” he tells me.
“Yes, the farmers will plant when they can, pressing the seed in deep in last year’s rows.
It’ll grow up right between the dying things.
You’ll see.”

As the summer grows hot, both soy and corn start to peak through the brush in tiny budding rows. At first, the fresh crops appear more like weeds filling in between old stalks and stems. But as the sun beats down, the vibrant green shoot up all the more, and there is no doubt that the harvest will come after all— right in the middle of the ragweed and withered leftovers.

And the field stares back at me every day, making plain a reality that surrounds me from every side, at every moment:

Right here, even in all of this, there are seeds being planted, new life growing.

Those who have been around through decades of the rain and draught have seen this promise surprise and delight enough times to know. They’ve lived it, and some have even let it take root in their souls. Those precious few, I think, are the saints among us.

And then there are others of us, too. Aren’t there?
Because it is hard to believe what they said— that life could really grow up right here, in the midst of dying things.

Sometimes, this truth feels like false optimism, and so rational cynicism ignores the green poking through. The floods are real and the season is short and we are all certainly at the mercy of what comes each day. But yet there is a seed in the soil, too; soil that is, in itself, a miracle— a resurrection of every sort of dead thing. And now that miraculous earth holds and nurtures and mothers life from its unlikely darkness. Resurrection, as unexplainable and unpredictable as it is, exists all around.

At other moments, my desire for perfection (or at least, the appearance of perfection) undermines the growth, ashamed that the grounds of my life are not properly tilled and turned, haunted that seeds and weeds are both rooted there together: Others will see, I find myself thinking so often. What if others see the entangled mess of my life? How can I take a risk or show up or be vulnerable if I have not already arrived? What if the chaos, the untidiness, the enmeshment is all exposed?

And then there is the anxiety that always accompanies paradox— and there is always paradox. That life and death, mercy and purity, desire and peace always coexist together. Because the temporal and eternal, the divine and the mortal, the infinite and limited are always overlapping in this Kingdom-life. And within that paradox, within that sacred entanglement, there are seeds of light and goodness being intentionally pressed into our world, into us. The remnants of what was and what happened to be and what is and what comes next are all right here.

We live in and with the past, present, and future forming the landscape of our lives.

The trinity of it is inescapable.

All of this truth surrounds the church and parsonage these days. From each window I see the mixed fields, and I think of the messiness of life:
Of the toddlers sticky, popsicle hands and dirty feet and tangled hair; of drywall and subfloor being replaced in those back bedrooms leaving the rest of the house to piles and heaps of undoing; of those stacks of newborn diapers and wipes unopened but ready; of both the joy and burn of the relentless summer sun. Seeds pressed in amongst the ordinary, the leftovers.

But those same fields remind me of that greater reality, that grand story, too. Out there and in here is the Parable of the Sower being lived out each day— the Sower who generously and audaciously plants seeds right in the midst of the weed-fiilled ground and hard soil and in front of birds and on the beaten path and in the rich, ready patch, too.

And it tells us more about the Sower than the soil, doesn’t it? That this great and faithful Farmer is not limited to the tilled and manicured life. He is not measuring the seed of His Word, preventing scarcity or ensuring efficiency.
He sows in the tended field and the overgrown field.
He speaks to the steady heart and the chaotic heart.
He opens His hand to eager and the unexpectant.

Oh, for the mercy to receive it. To take it in. To let this Great Love bury itself deep, take root, break through the surface of our cluttered lives and maybe even nourish the world.
This is the Word of Gospel after all, isn’t it? The very seed the Sower proclaims and shares?

This afternoon, when I look out, I see the soil begin to crack from torrents of sun, and we find ourselves wondering how we now ask for rain.
And as I stare across the sea of green stalks, I can feel a baby kick up at my ribs, a jab so strong I wince.
And here too, within me, is another reminder.
Right here, in the stretching and aching and labor is life.
Even here, we are about to be reborn and bloom.