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"