The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field… Matthew 13:31 (NKJV)

Every Life – The Seed Series – Part 3

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

Mustard seeds can’t help but grow. In Ancient Hebrew times, they grew prolifically, wild and at will. Some might think this makes it a weed. But if Jesus wanted to call it a weed in his parable, he would have. The mustard plant was doing what it is was naturally designed to do: grow beyond the confines and potential of its original form. It transformed, even beyond expectation.

The parable is less about how insignificant a small seed may seem, and more about the significance of every seed, no matter how small or fragile they may appear.

Let’s take it one step further. It’s not just about the small yet significant nature of seeds within you, but seeds within others too. The seed of heaven into this world that IS you, and that IS others.

As we quoted in Part One of this series, Henry David Thoreau said, “It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”

Every seed contains life.

Every. Single. One.

What do you see?

We live in such a polarising world where personal value and significance is traded and lost and found and unseen and missed and misunderstood and bartered for and used up for political and economic gain and everything in between. We have these filters attached to our hearts and lives, whether we release or not (whether we’re Christians or not) and we view life – REAL BLOOD AND BONE AND BREATH AND HEART AND SOUL AND SPIRIT LIVES – through these filters. We place value on others or not according to the filter that we view life through. Somehow we have to work through our collective baggage, our inherited preferences, and our skeptical conclusions and learn to see each, no matter what, as beloved of God.

Every seed contains life. Every life, although small, is significant.

What I’ve got within me, you have within you. Eternity planted in our hearts by our Creator, the Divine, and mysterious God. Our responsibility towards each other, as fellow human beings, is to help bring about growth within each other that, like the mustard plant, brings about vitality and wholeness and health and joy. Have a little faith and hope in one another. Love each other. Divine love is the kind of love that scoops up the edges of the world (rather than cutting them off), gathers them together and holds them close. As Jesus followers, our mission is not about polarisation; Our holy mandate is to bring heaven to earth.

And the greatest way to bring heaven to earth is to awaken the seeds of eternity within each other through love.

Every life is precious.

This is a complicated truth. While every life is precious, some lives are harder to love than others. But the mandate to love is no less valid on the hard to love lives, then beautiful and easy to love ones. In Jesus, there is grace for the complexity. However, the grace is not for the one we cast our eye down upon. The grace is for us. To enable us to love without reservation, to help without preference and to work for peace. That's a grace I need every single day.

What kind of miracles would take place in a world where every life, every seed planted upon the earth, mattered to all the other ones, especially the ones proclaiming to be the hands and feet and heart of Jesus in the world?

Seeds can't help but grow… what seeds are you planting? Leave us a comment below.

Go to Part 4 – Our Seeds »

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