Just Keep Sowing

Just Keep Sowing by debgrant

Monday morning seeds (Dried up tidbits that broke the surface of my brain soil)

• My own passage to literacy

• Germany trip encounter with illiteracy

• Martin Luther quote

• Salman Rushdie quote

• Refurbished cigarette vending machines

• The parable

Follow along if you dare:

• I can’t remember what life felt like before I could read. I am grateful that I was taught early how to decipher letters and words, form sentences, read and write. I was a soil-ful seed recipient.

• I wandered into a bookstore in Erfurt, Germany one day and was slapped upside the head with what situational illiteracy feels like. I recognized books, words, pages but couldn’t read a thing.

• The reason I was in Germany was to tour the historical sites of the life of Martin Luther. It was in Eisenach, Luther’s (and Bach’s) growing up place that I saw a plaque written in German by a tree in a courtyard. I sucked up my humility of not reading German and found a person who could translate it for me. It was a quote attributed to Luther, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree.”

• It takes a seed to plant an apple tree. Someone sowed a seed.

• Salman Rushdie has lived under the threat of death for decades because he wrote a book in which he depicted God in a manner that some found offensive. Someone almost succeeded in killing him this week. A Rushdie quote has broken the surface of the soil recently. “A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb … But we are not helpless … We can sing the truth & name the liars.”

• The parable of the sower is one I keep returning to, especially in times when the cancerous worm of “what does it matter?” surfaces during the day. The take-away message for me is always: Just keep sowing.

• The seeds that I have are words, sentences, blogs and books that have been given to me to throw for which I am eternally grateful.

• I sow ELOGOS and now Barefoot Crossing(have you subscribed yet?) When I re-read Barefoot Crossing for the day, I am genuinely shocked that I created and get to participate in this seed-sowing adventure with a God who keeps supplying seeds to my well-fertilized soul.

• There is an organization called "Art-o-Mat.” (artomat.org) Art-o-mat machines are repurposed cigarette vending machines that dispense cigarette pack-sized artwork for $5 each. It is for the purpose of making little bits of original art accessible to as many people as possible. There are over 200 machines worldwide and 400 contributing artists. This week I became one of those 400 contributing artists. I sow art. (jazzwater.com and etsy.com/shop/jazzwater)

• Just keep sowing, my friends, with whatever seeds you have been given. Just keep sowing.

Peace,

Deb