Friday mid-morning I head to the mailbox, already discouraged by the few hours of too fast starts, emotional melt downs (mine and the minis) and being a tired, less than gracious mama. Sitting in the pile of car ads and political mailers is a note, a lifeline.

In the midst of the swirling, there comes a hard stop as I read the words of encouragement. And you can bet the tears start falling, hard. 

Three more times over the weekend, the same message will get driven hard into my head and my heart: the seeds we plant may take years to bear a harvest. 

But don’t stop planting. 

A favorite children’s book in our house is The Lupine Lady. Have you read it? 

It’s about a woman who makes a promise to her grandfather as a young girl to make the world a more beautiful place. As she travels the world and eventually settles by the sea, she can’t quite figure out how to make her mark on the world.

And then one day, sitting in her bedroom with an aching back, she figures it out.

That fall finds her throwing fistfuls of lupine seeds like some wild child, causing more than a few raised eyebrows. Come the warming breath of spring, the country is bursting with purples, blues and whites in all the nooks and crannies of the village and rolling hills. 

Her far flung seeds made her look crazy in the moment, but they yielded a harvest that transformed her community.

And those were just flowers.

What kind of future beauty could you sow today in the lives of the people around you? 

• In the coworkers you rub shoulders and have after dinner drinks with?
• In the friends you text or call or *gasp,* write a letter to?
• In the little souls that you have been tasked with shaping under your roof?
• In the stranger you sit next to on the plane, in the Uber or while waiting to get your child from school?
• In the faithfully showing up every day to do the work before you, whatever it may be?

Someday, on the other side of Heaven, we might be stunned by the harvest we were allowed to help reap because we said yes to generous seed planting. 

Let’s today and this week fling a few seeds wildly around in the form of kind words, service to others, extravagant love and invitations to participate in the wild and beautiful places Abba is leading each of us.