Sowing Life

Last week...

I sat at my local coffee shop reading with my just-turned-six-year-old who had completed kindergarten two days before. She looked out the window and exclaimed that the shop’s garden appeared greener than at our last visit, so we ventured outside and spent a few minutes examining together the tiny tomatoes which had formed but were not yet fully grown. 

A garden is a simple reminder that life is lived in cycles and seasons. There is a season for sowing, a season for growing, a season for bearing fruit, for reaping and feasting, for dying and making way for new life. Life breeds life and the seeds of all things begin in the fruit which came before.   

Last week...
my church honored and celebrated our seniors who are graduating from high school at the end of the month. Three of them beautifully led us in song that morning. I couldn’t help but remember my own senior Sunday and marvel that it was sixteen years ago. My friend and I sang a duet at our senior Sunday, a song called “Remember Me.”

Remember Me
When the children leave their Sunday schools with smiles
Remember Me
When they’re old enough to teach, old enough to preach, old enough to leave

My peers and I were the leavers then. We were entering a new season and joining the collection of teachers and preachers who sow and till and plant and tend. Another lifetime later and in God’s goodness, my dueting friend is now a church minister who literally preaches. It is my happy burden as a mother to teach my daughters and before I blink twice, they will be the leavers. Whatever our roles, whatever our work, we can be sowers of life.

Last week...
I was privileged to celebrate the life of a church member who had recently passed away. I didn’t know him personally but as his family and friends described his heart and legacy, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and bounty of just one life well sown. 

So here in the midst of May’s yield, and from my current position in this circle of life, I look back and am grateful for the life-sowers who came before, who gave their gifts and volunteered their time teaching and training, leading and loving. I look around and rejoice in the fruit of their labor, a generation of life-sowers launching into the world to scatter new seed. And I look ahead to the day when the little life-sowers in our care now will join us in this work. May we be faithful to them today.

Age to age and heart to heart
Bound by grace and peace
Child of wonder, child of God
I’ve remembered you,
Remember Me 

In and through and above this cycle is the Life-Giver Himself who ordained it. He transcends the ages and generations and this reminds us that, in Him, our life-sowing work will as well. When we use our days to love God and others, to make disciples, to teach and preach the gospel of Christ who gave His life so that we may live forever, we remember Him. And it is in remembrance of Him, while looking to the future He has promised, that we work here in the land of seasons and cycles, of life and death, to sow the sort of temporal existence which bears eternal fruit in our forever home - where there is only LIFE.

"The prophets do not live forever; but the word which they preached is doing its work when they are in their graves."
--- Matthew Henry