Day Twenty-Six – January 23, 2020  

Read: The Parable of the Sower Matthew 13:1-8 New Revised Standard Version

 

Visual Liturgy: The Sower by Workofthepeople.org

 

Are you a gardener?  Have you raised vegetables?  How was your harvest?

 

When we were first married, we lived across the street from a community garden.  Every day and evening there were people hoeing, planting, and dragging jugs of water to their plots.  I loved watching their gardens grow.  The only time it was ever a problem was at the end of the garden season.  I would be out walking the dogs and invariably some gardener would try to give me a zucchini that had grown to be the size of a baseball bat.

 

Some years my garden has done well.  One year Japanese Beetles invaded my garden, destroying all of my raspberry bushes and decimating my shrub roses.  I’ve planted tulip bulbs, only to have the rabbits chew them down to the nub once the bulb had broken through the service.  And there have been years where my garden flourished and things took off.

 

We lived in our last house for 25+ years.  Every year I worked more soil and manure into the front flower bed.  I used to call it my “black gold” dirt because it was so rich and healthy.  Things were able to grow in that good soil, that never even sprouted when we moved in.  Now I am in a new house, with lots of trees, and I need to learn new ways of gardening.  I’m excited to get to work on the soil and turn it into black gold.

 

In Matthew 13, the crowds are pressing in around Jesus, so that he climbed into a boat and taught the people who were on the shoreline.

 

Music:

Good Soil by Handt Hanson

For the Beauty of the Earth – Mormon Tabernacle Choir

 

Prayer Focus:

How is the soil of your spiritual life?

What can you do to “work” your soil?

 

 

Grace and peace,
Pastor Karen Bruins