Carrying a Bag of Seed

In August of 2018 I started leading a life group at my church called Faithfully Feeding Family. The entire concept was built around the idea that we don’t spend enough time together around the dinner table.

I did a lot of reading, spent a lot of time preparing for that group. My goal was to convince those in attendance that being busy with jobs, sports, and a myriad of other activities will not make their kids better adults. Time around the table has proven over and over again, to be the greatest single factor in the upbringing of well adjusted, contributing adults. I had no idea then, that we’d be entering a quarantine a year and a half later, and that we would be forced to spend time with our family.

Schools are closed, businesses shut down, and most impactful, I think, for families is that athletic activities are cancelled. Our kids are home. Some of our kids have online school they can do, some have chats and social media events they can attend, but they are home. I am praying that families are making the most of it.

It can be tough. We are learning to be sufficiently secure in stillness, and it’s good for our children. It’s good for all of us.

I want it to last. Not the sickness, not the quarantine, but the closeness. I love seeing my boys working together, helping each other, and especially laughing together. I will embrace all the freedoms their maturity offers them, but I hope they remember this season of high density brotherhood and how it brought them back to moments of equality and camaraderie in their daily activities.

I hope all of us remember. I hope that what we choose in this moment is more than staying home to protect others from a virus. I hope that we choose being present at home to protect ourselves from dissension and self-centeredness.

I’m on several texting threads with different groups of people. The charge of encouragement I get from these folks is electric. There are several groups I am a part of because of church, some are family threads, some are home-school parents, some are public school moms, one is a group of high school friends, and there is even one group where I only know one person in the group, but I don’t have to know someone to be encouraged by them. One of these groups has challenged us to say something positive on the thread once a week. One group has challenged us to set alarms and stop at 7:00 p.m. every day to pray for our community and our world. Another group has me up at 5:00 a.m. every day to pray in unity for our families, our neighbors, our church, and our world.

I see these groups, and my family unit here at home a bit like a garden. We are all in our threads, in rows if you will, planted for a purpose. Each group drawing elements from the soil of God’s Word to produce something worth harvesting. Different purposes, different ways of growing, different challenges, and different perspectives, but all growing the same direction. We all want the same thing. We want to see the kingdom of God bursting with life.

It won’t even begin without seed.

This morning I read Psalm 126 in my daily reading. Verses 5 & 6 are a couple of my favorites.

Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting.
He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed,
Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

We all want to walk out of our homes in the coming weeks without scars, we want to return to some normalcy, but the cry has gone up for us all to be better. We want to be stronger. We want to be carrying the sheaves we tended, grew, watered, and harvested and we want to say we were not shut down, we were not shut off, we were productive.

I realized yesterday, that even that challenge, as positive as it sounds, has brought stress. My back had a spasm last night. My heart races now and then. There is a shoving and a pressing from outside this safety that would tell me I need to be more than what I am. My schedule hasn’t changed much, why would I demand so much more of myself than what is my normal day of being home and “heart-schooling” my boys? The world outside my walls is being introduced to my normal, and still I somehow interpret the challenges as a standard I must rise to.

That is a deception that will uproot instead of plant.

I am here, where I’ve been for years. I am planting, and watering, and tending the same seeds as before, and there is a time when there is nothing to do. There is a time when the growth is fully dependent on waiting while the soil, the rain, and the sun do their part. I think I’m not alone in this.

Just because your view has changed, doesn’t mean your calling has shifted. The seed God called you to sow is still in need of watering, don’t abandon the calling He gave you.

Ephesians 4 is one of my all time favorite passages. I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,

Your calling is still important, even if it’s on pause. How you walk in that calling is what is being tested now. Look at the first few verses in Ephesians 4.

² with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³ eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. ⁴ There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism, ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

This is a season. It will end. Until it is over I will spend some time weeping, I will grieve some of the normalcy I knew, but I want to look back afterward and say I was one of those faithfully carrying my bag of seed. Wherever I step or misstep, whatever I communicate, whenever I kneel and bow my head, I hope that in all of it, in the midst of laughter, tears, writing, frustration, texting, Zoom-ing, boredom, daydreaming, movie watching, cookie baking, toilet paper hunting, and prayer, prayer, prayer, I am continuing in the essentials of sowing a great harvest.