Planting Seeds

Yesterday, during the lunch hour a gentleman stopped by to take a look at the church. He said that he'd attended Liberty for about a year back in the mid 80's. As we walked around the old Chapel, which had been reconfigured since he was here back to its original plan, he shared a bit of his story. He said that while he didn't exactly come to faith at Liberty, it was an integral part of his path and five years later, once he'd moved - he came to faith after years of searching. Seeds had been planted, or cultivated, during his short time at Liberty and he'd stopped back to say how those seeds had blossomed.

As he relayed this story to me, I was struck by the fact that we, as Christians, are not always sure of our impact. You can't necessarily measure things like spiritual growth in the same way you can measure height or health. When you teach a Sunday School lesson and spend most of your time trying to corral the kids, you never know whether they actually got it. And the same can be said for a lot of what we do. It's easy to see the growth of attendance and buildings, things that we can measure, but it's so much harder to know whether people are really growing in their faith.

So, we end up doing one of two things. The first is to stress and be anxious and try every possible way to determine whether we're being successful or not. And the second option is to continue to be faithful to what we've been called to do - and trust that God will grow the seeds that we plant. That doesn't get us off the hook, because I do believe we'll be held accountable for what we did. What it means is that we should work hard and work well without thought to results - because if we do, those results will come...