I love seeing the colors of the plants and flowers that stud my neighborhood this time of year. I’ve marveled at the variety of plants that grow. There are seemingly endless flowers in so many shapes, sizes, and colors, and the fruit and vegetables that mature during the growing season. There is one thing, however, that captures my attention even more and that’s the number of seeds that are produced.
Some plants and trees flower early in the spring, before they even really start growing for the summer. Others do their growing first and then produce their seed at the end of the season. In either case, many more seeds are produced than ever take root, grows and establishes themselves as new plants or trees. A single lupine easily produces a hundred seeds, while a single mature pine tree produces thousands of seeds. Very few of these seeds grow. My guess would be 1% or less. Perhaps not the most encouraging odds, but the way God designed seeds.
This makes me think about the seeds God asks us to plant. God calls us to bear fruit, which produces the seeds we plant in the lives of other people. Are we to plant only one or two seeds and hope they grow? Or are we to be more like the pine tree, allowing our maturity in Christ to produce fruit that yields seed beyond number, which we freely distribute as God gives us opportunities, hoping that a few take root? I suspect we are to do the latter.
We don’t always know which seeds will root, nor are we responsible for which grow and which do not. Jesus tells us as much in the parable of the seed that falls on the different kinds of ground (Luk 8.4-8). As the sower scatters the seed, it falls on different kinds of ground producing differing germination and growth. The sower scattered the seed knowing that some would not grow. Yet his motivation to sow the seed came from the knowledge that some would grow.
The same thing can motivate us. When we focus on sowing the seed of God’s light and truth, we may scatter seed in places where it won’t grow, but seed will grow and that which does may even surprise us.