seeds

if i were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of His life that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest.

for it is God's love that warms me in the sun and God's love that sends the cold rain. it is God's love that feeds me in the bread i eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. it is the love of God that sends the winter days and when i am cold and sick, and the hot summer when i labour and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. His love spreads the shade of the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the labourers are resting and the mules stand under the tree.

it is God's love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also behind the clamour of the city God speaks to me in his judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from His will.

if these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, i would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy.

and i would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms into the gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with wheat. if in all things i consider only the heat and the cold, the food or the hunger, the sickness or labour, the beauty or pleasure, the success and failure or the material good or evil my works have won for my own will, i will find only emptiness and not happiness. i shall not be fed, i shall not be full. for my food is the will of Him who made me and who made all things in order to give Himself to me through them.

-Thomas Merton: "Seeds"

Why the name?

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us"

1 John 3:16-23

Sometimes my worst enemy is myself. I can tear myself down better than anyone else in the world. It seems like I should be able to stop - but it comes back again and again, that terrible voice that tells me I'm not good enough. It says, "You didn't make the grade you wanted," or, "Did you pray today?" or, "Just look at yourself," or, "And you call yourself a Christian..."

And all too often I believe it.

See, John says that our hearts will condemn us. He didn't say maybe - he said "when" it happens. It sucks to be told by yourself that you're unworthy. It hurts to think that you can never be the person that God wants you to be. But that's why I love this passage so much.

God is greater than my condemning heart.

He tells me that I'm worth it. He tells me that I can be who I should be because he is my strength. All it takes is for me to believe in his son and love my neighbors - wow.

But sometimes it's good to remember that my heart can condemn me. After all, in remembering the condemnation I can also remember the redemption. So bring on my condemning heart - I have the saving power of Christ.