Seeds

I’m starting seeds in my bay window and contemplating the mystery. Each envelope holds hundreds so tiny they are hidden in the seam at the bottom. The kit tells me to water the hockey puck pellets in the flimsy plastic tray from Home Depot, drop a few seeds onto each, scruff up dirt to cover, and wait. A few days go by and tiny green sprouts emerge. I’m amazed that it worked—really—with my helter-skelter sowing and scraping up dirt with a kitchen fork.

I even tried the garlic seeds I got from my friend Pete last fall—the Pete that now gardens in heaven with his Savior in a garden without weeds. Or winter and the need to start seeds indoors.

I looked up planting garlic from seed and it said don’t do it—it never works—but it for sure is. Those garlic seeds which looked dead are sprouting and smell like garlic in my front room, right between the 500 lettuce plants (all from one envelope) and 300 basil ones. Also Pete’s rhubarb, though I’m hoping it doesn’t become boss of my garden because you can only eat so much rhubarb. I’m doing poppies, too, for no other reason than I love the jolly color of poppies. And zinnias (but not yet—wait until April, says Burpee.)

Now it’s just the day before Good Friday as I pull the plastic lids off my seed trays. I’m getting ready to celebrate my Savior’s death and resurrection—that which gives me abundant life, just like these seeds are so alive in my bay window.

And I’m remembering how Jesus, in his last week—Holy Week, told his followers that it was time for him to be glorified. And to do so wasn’t going to be easy at all, though it could’ve been. He could’ve demanded glory, but instead he chose the hard way, the hardest way, the only way which would take my deserved death and place it on his own shoulders as he hung there on the cross.

He chose to die for me, for me. 

He tried to prepare his friends with a warning that talked of seeds like the ones I’m growing now. He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you” (which means listen twice as hard) “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24).

And I’m thinking about my seeds bearing fruit—or leaves, or flowers, or cloves, or stalks. About how when I started it all they looked dead, like dried up ant heads, but now they are tiny and green and very much alive.

I remember also the parable in Luke where Jesus told of sowing seed—how most of it was taken, trampled, devoured, withered, or choked. How the devil is at work stealing the seed as fast as he can on this earth. But how some of it lands in good soil and grows and yields a hundred times what was planted.

I want that seed. The one that yields hundreds, like my 500 baby lettuce sprouts in my bay window.

That is the seed that is held fast in our hearts. And that is the seed that bears fruit. With patience. (Luke 8:15)

Jesus says the seed is the word of God (Luke 8: 11). And I know that he—Jesus—is the Word. He is the seed.

He is the seed in me. He is the one who died in order that I might bear fruit. 

So I go back to look at my sprouts again, held fast in the bay window, and I watch them with patience. Waiting for the fruit. Waiting for Easter, when my Savior proved that death is not more powerful than life.

That I can have life abundant and life eternal with him, the Word, the seed, because he died and rose for me.

Hope and Be.Longing