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Connections&
July 14, 2002--15th Sunday of the Year
"A sower went out to sow. Some of the seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up... But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold."
Matthew 13:1-23
Seed sown along the margins
After a lifetime of working to support his family, the new retiree decided to return to college to realize his dream of earning a college degree.
Tentatively, guardedly, he enrolled in a humanities course--a subject that had always fascinated him and about which he believed he had some understanding. Like the accurate and diligent man he was, he did all the reading, took all the notes, and prepared for every class with great seriousness and attention.
For his final project he chose to do a paper on the history of the English language. He worked long and hard on the paper, investing it with all the creativity and diligence he possessed. He was proud of the final product and proudly passed it on to the professor. The intellectual yearnings submerged for forty years were finally seeing the light of day.
But when he got the paper back, it was covered with red-inked margin notes and rather caustic comments. The paper apparently landed in the hands of a graduate assistant, who had taken it upon himself to savage the poor man's paper and his struggling efforts at academic style and expression.
The man showed the paper to his son, a candidate for a Ph. D. The son reviewed the paper with his father, pointing out the many good parts of the paper and taking the sting out of the graduate assistant's cutting margin notes. He also showed his father the parts of the paper that needed clarity.
But it didn't matter.
The man never took another course again.
His single abiding passion in life was education, his greatest unfinished accomplishment in life was his under-graduate degree.
But because of an imperious graduate assistant with a bad attitude and a red pen, his dream of a college degree would remain just a dream.
[From Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace by Kent Nerburn, pages 114-116.]
CONNECTION: We are all sowers of seed. By our attitudes, our beliefs, our actions we sow seeds of encouragement, joy and reconciliation--but some of the seeds we sow (like that of the sower of the Gospel who does not realize where his seed is falling) contribute to cycles of discouragement, anger, violence, abuse, enslavement and injustice. The call to discipleship, however, calls us to be careful and deliberate "sowers" of a harvest far greater and lasting than our own interests and profit. Christ calls us to be sowers of his Word in every situation and relationship, especially when such "sowing" can yield a harvest that benefits others far more than benefits us. u
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