Sowing Seeds

Two of our dear friends (Dale and Lueretta Shook) are celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary this week. They were members of our very first pastorate, Beaver Creek Baptist Church, in Spruce Pine, NC. I went there as pastor when I was in my senior year at Mars Hill University. Beaver Creek prepared me for a lifetime of ministry and I owe those dear folks so much. As church members, Dale and Lueretta were special friends. They bought me clothes (Patricia too), taught me how to trout fish, and encouraged us endlessly.

I look back over my life and I’m so thankful for church members like the Shooks, teachers, coaches, and friends who were used of God to sow seeds into my life that later took root and bore fruit. As a pastor I often wonder about the seeds I’ve planted over these four decades of ministry. How has God worked through Patricia and me both here and abroad? Will our work “follow us” after we have left this world? We sure pray it does.

My favorite preacher, Dr. Fred Craddock, tells about a phone call he received one day “out of the blue.” It was from a woman whose father had died. He remembered that this woman had been a teenager in a church he had served 20 years earlier. He also remembered that this girl never listened while he was preaching and was always passing notes and giggling with her friends in the balcony.

But now, having suffered the loss of her daddy, she was calling her former pastor. She said, “Dr. Craddock, I don’t know if you remember me.” Oh yes, he remembered. She continued, “When my daddy died, I thought I was going to come apart. I cried and cried.
But then I remembered something you said in one of your sermons.”

Fred Craddock couldn’t believe his ears. She actually remembered something he said in a sermon? I have had the same experience over and over. People writing me or contacting me on Facebook to thank me for something I said or did long forgotten on my part. It’s incredible and humbling to be reminded that God is doing all sorts of things through us that have lasting effects, whether we remember it or not.

God remembers! And that’s why our life review with Jesus one day will stun us as to what God can and does through one solitary life. I try to remind myself of the Bigger Story on those days when I am discouraged and “weary in well doing.” You should too. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like sowing seeds and we never know how or when the seed will take root. Since we cannot tell which seeds will germinate, let’s be generous in the way we sling seeds and trust God’s grace to do the rest.

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