EverydayEvangelism: Apprenticeship

After the talk of surfing and plowing, some more thoughts. My friend Theo commented that perhaps we should spend a year tending sheep and working on a farm...

I think there is something hiding in that thought-- not so much that we might simply do something like what people experienced in Jesus' time, as if we might gain a deeper insight into His words (although that might happen). Rather, the insights would be about discipleship.

Of the number of smells that remind me of precious childhood memories, two of them are the smells of dry dirt and fresh beans. Some of my best times were spent hanging out with my grandfather on his farm in California. The smell of dry dirt is everywhere in Central California. Last night, I smelled it in our garden on Charlie Derrickson's farm. It took me back. As I watered, I was reminded of a thought I used to have when I was a kid. When the dry dirt is damp, it has a different smell. I always associate that with morning. Days are hot in Central California but nights are very cool, in the 50s and 60s. There is a lot of dew in the early morning. And so we would head out to the ranch, the scents of dirt and dew and Papa's coffee swirling in the air. I used to think that smell of the dew and dirt was what the world must have smelled like right after God created it. It's funny, even when I was a hard-core atheist, I would remember that.

My grandfather grew a lot of beans, and when they were being harvested and taken to the processing shed... you could smell them for miles. Jessie was weeding the beans last night and I was thinking about how good it will smell to pick them.

But I digress. What I meant to say was that spending time growing things is a great lesson in evangelism and discipleship. Sometimes we hear Jesus speak and we wish he had told the parable of the remote control or the airplane. But He spoke of seeds and sheep and vines and growing things. Perhaps because to make things grow:

You have to work hard.

You have to be diligent.

You have to pull weeds.

You have to protect the plants from bugs.

You have to be patient, and wait for the harvest. You can't lose heart because you have worked hard every day, sweated, missed out on fun, and still no beans. But it's not time yet...

And you have to have faith that the process from seed to plant to flower to fruit to harvest is what is bound to happen.

But if I put faith first, you'd quit reading and be tempted to think it is magic fairy dust, and if we just have faith we won't need hard work, diligence, fighting pests, and patience!

Get out into the field today!