How God Works through a Seed

How God works…through a seed.

I remember as a child in elementary school my teacher telling us how plants came to grow on an island formed by volcanic eruptions in the ocean.  Just imagine before Hawaii existed above sea level.  There were, under the ocean, volcanic eruptions that formed mounds underwater to the point that eventually, it emerged above the water level.  Therefore, there was an island.  It had no vegetation.  The mystery was, “How did the vegetation get there?” How was the nourishment and growth brought to the island?”  Well that day in school, my teacher would explain to us that birds would fly over the island and drop seeds.  The seeds would grow, and many years later, humans would find an island full of vegetation in the middle of the ocean.

I fully trusted God as only the innocence of a child can.  I imagined God putting an instinct in the birds to hold seeds in their beaks and fly for many miles and then gingerly dropping the seeds, at just the right time, to land on the newly formed island.  This is the trust I had in the God who created the universe. There were no limits to what he could do.  I fully trusted whatever methods he used.

As I continued to trust His methods as the years passed (and my innocence slowly faded) I thought back, years later, to my perception of the birds gingerly holding the seeds in their beaks to drop them on the island.  The realization HIT me.  Those seeds fell in the form of bird droppings!!!  Wow!  That was a rude awakening after my pristine imaginings.

I was thinking about that today, and realized that when God nourishes our lives, or sends ‘seeds’ of growth our way, we many times imagine that they will come, carried gently in the beak of the bird, or in the arms of an angel. That is how deliveries sent by God come, don’t they?  But in reality, when a seed of growth is sent our way, more often we feel more like we’ve been ‘bombed’ by a bird.  Although we think the valuable thing is the seed, we also must consider the value in the fertilizer.  Sometimes when we are ‘bombed’, we need the ‘fertilizer’ that comes with the seed to make it grow.  God sent the fertilizer too, because we needed it for growth.  So let’s be open to what is sent our way, whatever form that it takes in it’s coming, because our God just might be turning what seems like ‘living in a sewer’ into a ‘tropical paradise,’ through growth in Him!