Sowing New Seeds
Van Gogh, The Sower, 1888
I’d like to give you a list of ten things I’m following in order to live a better life in the year ahead. But I’ve never been a list-guy. That works for some people, I know, but not for me. I look out ahead and see fog over the landscape, night still hanging over the mountains, but then, sometimes suddenly, I catch a glimpse of the sunrise breaking in the distance. It’s that light, mysterious, yet ever so real, I long for as I step into the new year.
The other way I’m thinking this year is that I want to sow new seeds. I’m an image-guy, I guess. I know I’ve talked about this one before in earlier writing, but my life has profoundly changed this last year. I have loved this Van Gogh painting for so long but in new ways today. I want to talk about being a sower in the days ahead. I want to sow new seeds that will sink into the ground, be watered by refreshing rain, sprout new life when the time comes.
Here's the way the Psalmist says it:
4 Restore our fortunes, LORD,
as streams return in the Negeb.
5 Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
6 He who goes out weeping,
carrying his bag of seed,
will come back with songs of joy,
carrying home his sheaves. Psalms 126
As I look out over our troubled world and wounded nation, I’ve cried out for restoration. Personally, many times over the last year, I went “out weeping / carrying [my] bag of seed.” If joy would come again, it would have to be through sorrow. I wanted desperately to come “back with songs of joy, / carrying home [the] sheaves.” This is my image for what I want in the new year.
Somehow a list of ten things puts the burden on my shoulders right now, “do these things and all will be well.” We let ourselves shoulder these endless lists of what we need to do. One big goal I have this year is to lift these endless lists of what I need to do. I just want to start sowing again, carrying whatever bag of seeds I’ve been given, confident that God will make the seed break forth in blossom. I want to watch for the blossoming, the new growth, the color, the freshness, the beauty. Could this be possible for me this year?
I’m getting older. Some things don’t work as they used to. People around me, so many of them I love so much, are suffering. We also live in a world on the brink of self-destruction, wars and rumors of wars, violence in the streets, killing and rape at inhuman levels, narcissism infecting most relationships, leaders rising up with outsized egos, laws broken with impunity. What can I possibly do?
The first three verses of this Psalm paint this reassuring picture:
1 WHEN the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like people renewed in health.
2 Our mouths were full of laughter
and our tongues sang aloud for joy.
Then among the nations it was said,
‘The LORD has done great things for them.’
3 Great things indeed the LORD did for us,
and we rejoiced.
Will the Lord restore our fortunes this coming year? Will we ever be “like people renewed in health”? That’s the seed I want to plant in my garden this year. Maybe it’s a seed of hopefulness, a seed of new confidence. Maybe is simply loving others. Maybe it’s living more carefully in the ordinary things of my days. Restoring my faith, daily, early each morning, is surely the deepest part of this renewal.
I am a writer. Whatever my limitations, I’ve been called to write. It’s the way I sort out what is true for me and hopefully true to the world in which I live. It’s the joy I feel when something seems said right. And so I say to my dear readers, expect from me this year writing that plants new seed from which may come laughter and singing for joy. It may be my little thing I can do to make life better. Maybe it can even change the world a little.
I’m planting seeds. I’m looking for the sunrise to break through the fog. I’m ready to sing. Having gone out in tears, I’m ready to come home bringing in the sheaves.