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Dear St. Christopher’s Family,
As I write this message I am finding the sound of cicadas in the trees almost deafening, and I am even indoors. I remarked to someone just the other day that the sound of cicadas in the summer is just the sound of it being HOT! The louder the cicadas are, the more miserable and dangerous is the heat, and all of us have been feeling it. Winter seems like a distant memory, and it’s hard to imagine what being cool will ever be like again. But Fall, such as it is in Texas, will return, as will Winter, though hopefully without the ferocity we’ve seen the last few years. It is a cycle; the same patterns recur over and over.
We do the same in the church. Of course, we mark the seasons with different colors, and our programs recur year after year. Always we can find a way to do them better, but there is comfort in repeating some things. It’s helpful to remember this cycle when we hear this parable of the Sower. It would be very easy to worry about what kind of ground we are that the seed falls on. The way the story is told in the Gospel makes it sound like the stakes are incredibly high. What if we miss our chance to be in the Kingdom of God? What if the excitement I feel now gets choked out? What if I’m just not feeling it lately, and living a life of faith is becoming a real drag?
To be sure, nothing is more important than being able to receive God’s Word and let it grow and bear fruit in us. But there is a season for sowing. The Sower will go out the next season and scatter seed: on us who are rocky ground, on us who are thorns, and us who are the good ground. Because God wants all that seed to grow. As God reminds us in Isaiah:
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
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