SOWING ACROSS GENERATIONS

A few months back my wife realized that many sermons and Bible lessons make references to sowing and reaping (planting and harvesting), but many of our children and young people have no understanding of these terms.

They’ve never dug up the ground and laid seeds in it. They’ve never tended growing crops and battled weeds and insects on their behalf. They’ve never prayed for rain to come or for the rain to stop so that their work would not be in vain. Many members of our congregations, adults included, have never picked from a bush, plucked from a branch, cropped from a plant, or cut from a stem any of the fruits or vegetables they consume.

The Lord had given Brother Charles Moore, our chief steward much the same realization. So this Saturday we planted our first church garden. We’ll use the fresh vegetables in our church kitchen and share them with the community.

Bro. Moore tilled up the ground in a corner of the church yard a few weeks back. On May 2nd, he taught our first gardening class. The kids, and some adults, came out to learn the proper way to plant tomatoes, okra, corn, and squash. They used the tools and handled the seedlings and the seeds. They even helped with the tiller. (A tiller’s a machine that break’s up the ground. It looks like the miniature offspring of a push lawn mower and a tractor that has some egg-beater genes.)

Everybody got dirty, my wife “supervised”, and those of us who grew up on farms reminisced. It was great.

But, the best thing about it was seeing the kids so excited.
Excited about the prospect of growing something with their own hands.
Excited about the feel and promise of farming.
And excited to be learning from the elders of our church.

Our children are not doomed to the intellectual imprisonment of computer and tv screens. Their knowledge of how to survive in the word does not have to be confined to the environs of school hallways and virtual landscapes. Our elders and the skills they’ve acquired over a lifetime are not obsolete.

We are all responsible for remembering that and for facilitating a tradition we’ve generally strayed from: the tradition of the elders passing on their stories and their knowledge to the children.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be a lecture.

It can be as simple as, “Drop these seeds here. Now pull the dirt over them and go get some water.”

When we connect the elders and the children we plant something old and eternal, something Biblical; something that is steeped in love and knowledge, connection and expansion.

And you know what the Good Book says, “You reap what you sow.”