"The farmer sleeps at night and is up and around during the day. Yet the seeds keep sprouting and growing, and he doesn't understand how. It is the ground that makes the seeds sprout and grow into plants that produce grain" - Mark 4:27-28
The end of every growth should be this. That the thing that grows must in the end become useful. Nature is full of good examples of this. When a tree grows, they always end up either bearing fruit or becoming a raw material for building something. When a cow grows, it becomes either a milk producing cow or one that bears calves or one that's big enough to produce much meat.
Sadly, this is not always what we get, and especially when it comes to man.
Where plants and animals seldom diverge from this growth pattern, humans do. Other people simply grow physically big but do not mature. While mature ones go on to become productive and contribute to the good of many, there are those who remain dependent, and a few become simply parasitic and criminal.
The bible tells us that every bit of creation was created right after each other. But while other living things continue to follow the expected growth pattern, human beings became the exception. Obviously something happened to us and to us alone but not to other created life forms. Again the bible tells us that that something is the fall of man into sin. When even predatory animals which eat other animals for food do not gather beyond that which they need, humans like to hoard and get and keep for themselves far beyond what they can use.
We need to be reminded and the bible reminds us. Mark 4:23 says, "If you have ears, pay attention!" God is alive and He still manages the whole universe. We can be reformed. We can go back to the original pattern of growth. None of us have to hide in the dark about who we are for who we are is transitory. We are on the way to becoming someone different, someone more mature and useful. Today we may be full of dirt and it mars our character and personhood. But just like a seed which is scattered, that old seed form will soon die, decay and be gone forever. But in its place will sprout a new growth, a seedling, then a plant. How, we don't really understand except to discern that there's some kind of a law or force that governs this process. Fortunately for plants and animals, they don't have the faculty to argue against nor to defy these natural forces and laws. We do and that's why some of us end up where we shouldn't be.
For growth that follows the ideal growth pattern, we need to allow ourselves to be governed by the same natural and divine laws that other created things are governed with. We need to lower our capacity to self-determine, defying even the laws and commandments of God. We need to seek the old way - the God way. We can start by treating each other well for this is one area we have gone too far away from. We need to let our light shine This means putting in something useful out there so that others may not stumble in the dark. We need to rely more on the organic way of producing things and not force nature nor defy and manipulate it. But above all, we need to reach out to our Creator for guidance. Only He can point us to the old way. Man used to have so much more but we have lost a lot of that because of self-determination, insisting that we know better, disregarding our Creator's words. Hopefully by now, we have learned from our mistakes. The faster we get to this realization, we sooner we grow and become useful, not only to ourselves but to everyone else. Let's all seek to grow, not forgetting that the end and the measure of this is usefulness.
(Picture above, courtesy of Thompson and Morgan)
