Dear Rose Park,
This past Thursday I took Simon and Winnie to meet my mom (or as they call her “Grandma from Holland”) for lunch at Good Earth. After we ordered our food and found a table, a woman approached us and struck up a conversation with my mom. I didn’t know who she was, but after she left my mom had a big smile on her face and then told me this story…
My mom used to work in Student Development at Hope College, apparently this woman was a student worker in the office while my mom was there. During college, this woman became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. As my mom put it, it sounded like this woman felt she was treated differently because she became pregnant while a student. My mom didn’t know the full details, and I’m not sure the full details are all that important, but here’s the point of the story: after the baby was born, my mom went to this woman’s apartment to bring a gift. This woman never forgot my mom’s act of kindness and almost twenty years later at a table in Good Earth said, “it meant a lot to me and I always remembered you.”
There’s a parable in the Gospel of Matthew about a sower who tosses out seed. Some of the seed landed on the path, some fell on rocky places, some fell among thorns, and some fell on good soil. Jesus is like this sower who tosses out seeds of love, grace, hospitality, and compassion to all of us. He doesn’t withhold seed for only certain people in certain situations, instead He recklessly and generously tosses seed to everyone in the hope that it will land in the good soil of our hearts to produce a crop for the Kingdom.
Jesus also calls us to sow seeds for the Kingdom. I’m sure my mom never thought twice about it, but she was tossing Gospel seeds for the Kingdom in the form of a baby gift twenty-years ago. It’s my hope that we can toss Gospel seeds as well. Whether it’s the commitment to a life of prayer, an invitation to coffee or lunch, a Wednesday night meal at the Family Table, a card and some flowers around a difficult anniversary, or even a baby gift to a new mom, let us follow in the dusty footsteps of Jesus and toss the seeds of the Gospel wherever we go.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Mark