(Photograph from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, November 30, 2018)

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet the heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Luke 6:26

I never told you all that early in the summer a firefighter showed up at our door asking if a life flight helicopter could land in our front yard. Well, of course! A neighbor down the road had a kitchen explosion and was to be flown to Grady’s trauma center in Atlanta. I haven’t mentioned it before because I wanted to make sure our neighbor was doing well before I said anything. She is healing, under the care of the Great Physician.

I thought about that this morning as I watched the birds from my front porch rocker. Every year we have at least a thousand small black birds who gather on our lawn. They are making their way south for the winter. They hover over, then land, like a thousand tiny helicopters, as if we have a helipad on our front lawn.

As I drink my morning coffee, watching these wonders of nature, I often ponder. As you may well know, if you’ve read by blog over the years, that I am in a perpetual search for the meaning of life. At 63, I’ve narrowed it down to life having three purposes: to praise God, to love thy neighbor as thyself, and to bring up the next generations.

As the Bible says, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1) It goes on to say there is a time to live, and a time to die; there is a time to sow, and a time to reap.

And so, it’s sowing I want to concentrate upon today. I think of my granddaughters and pray that I am planting the right seeds for their futures. If bringing up the next generations is indeed a purpose of life, then I must sow, sow, and sow.

I spent the 40 years of my career working with college students of all ages. I hope I sowed some seeds among them too, and that one has already, or some day will, affect their crops.

For now, my favorite thing in life is to spend quality time with my precious grand-girls. I hope my interactions over the years has had, and will have, a profound impact on their lives. But I don’t know.

It is my deepest desire that some day they will sit on their porches, enjoying God’s blessings of nature. That they will praise God, love their neighbors as themselves, and bring up the next generations.

And perhaps on some days, they will think of me.

Into a dancer you have grown, from a seed somebody else has sown; Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own and somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go, may lie a reason you were alive but you’ll never know.

Jackson Brown, “For a Dancer,” Late for the Sky (1974)

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