“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12.24-50)

Like most gardeners I have been up to my elbows in dirt since the weather began to turn warm.  My plot is the Mobile Meals Garden Project at the Meeting Place Senior Center in Columbus where we grow produce to add to the Mobile Meals program in Polk County, as well as the in-house meals at the senior centers in Columbus, Saluda, and Green Creek.

Plus, whatever surplus cannot be prepared and used in the meals on a given day is bagged up and distributed free of charge to the senior center participants in order to provide them with nutritious fresh veggies and to reduce their own food costs. It is a wholly volunteer effort which is supported entirely by contributions.

I was raised from a very early age to love the whole gardening process. My dad grew up on a very successful farm during the Great Depression where there were often two or three destitute families living on the farm being fed from its bounty, and it was from this very devout, life-long Baptist deacon that I learned both the practical and mystical/spiritual aspects of making things grow.

Dad’s two favorite plants to grow were Kentucky Wonder pole beans and Silver Queen corn. I have spent many hours erecting river cane trellises for the beans and hilling the ground along the corn rows, and as we would work together Dad would go into his teaching mode, which in many ways far surpassed anything I learned in seminary.

Your see, when Jesus spoke the line quoted at the beginning of this column he was, as he was inclined to do, using a practical and agrarian image as a metaphor for our human experience.

In the Biblical context Jesus is telling his followers that hard old ways of being and doing have to die for something new and more glorious to be born. The metaphor which Jesus employs tells us that a dry and seemingly lifeless grain of wheat (or a bean or corn kernel) is like our lives when all the joy and peace has gone out of it. Life is like that. 

It often takes the very best in us and through frustrations, anxieties, losses, and fears we dry up and trap inside a hard shell the best of our hearts and souls. It is only when we deliberately plant that life, that seed, in the ground and allow it die that a new life will come forth. In this case that ground into which the seed is planted is God’s love for us embodied in Jesus Christ.

The process is very simple, and at the same time quite hard, because taking that shell and putting it into the ground requires trust, nurture, and care. The ground must be prepared and receptive (as God is always prepared and always receptive); the seed is then planted and covered in trust that something better will emerge (as we must trust that God’s love will sustain us); the hard outer shell must then soften and break open as it is nurtured with water and soil and warmed by the sun (as we must accept the death of the old self in the nurturing safety of the divine); the new roots then break through and must burrow into the nourishing ground and the new shoots emerge from the dead husk to break through the soil as a new life (just as we must die to the old, hard self, become rooted in the divine being and rise to a new life); and then the new vine or stalk must be cared for and encouraged to grow appropriately so that in the proper course of time it bears fruit hundreds of times greater than the single hard seed that was initially put into the ground to die.

Of course, sadly, some seeds are planted but they fail to germinate and simply disappear, just as some lives are given the opportunity to be reborn to a new life, but their shells have become so thick and hard they simply fail to thrive.

With wheat and Kentucky Wonder beans and Silver Queen corn this whole process is outside of their control. The furrows are dug, the seeds planted and covered, they are watered and protected by the gardener, and those that are fertile take root, seek the sunlight, climb upward, and bear their fruit.

With us the process is somewhat different because we have to make the choice to enter into the process, to allow our hard shelled self to be buried in the divine life and love, there to be nurtured and sustained until we break forth with a newly rooted life and bear new fruits of the spirit.

The plant’s seeds do not have a choice, but we must make the choice to let our hard old selves die in the love of God and then be reborn to a more vibrant and fruitful life in the Spirit – but we have to make the choice and enter into the process.

The ground is prepared. The seeds are ready. The sunlight and water are plentiful. The time is now.

– Submitted by Michael Doty