It seems to me that in today’s parable stories about the seeds, St. Mark is trying to teach us that God’s Kingdom & God’s Reign are mysterious, surprising & unexpected. I have 2 illustrations that feature my dad on this Fathers’ Day Weekend. In 1 story, my dad drove the wrong way up a one-way street; we were face to face with a New York City bus that was coming at us. From the back seat, I was fearing the worst, like a crash & injuries, & not getting to our cousin’s house for the birthday party & the cake! What I didn’t see coming was the bus driver stopping the bus, & motioning to my dad to make a U-turn, & get our car going again in the right direction. He could just as easily as forced my dad to back up to the previous corner to make a U-turn, so this was a good solution for all, especially for us. But all agreed it was a surprise, like seeds just sprouting thru the surface of the soil!

In the 2nd illustration, on a Friday night, my dad came home & told us he’d been laid off from his job of running a warehouse. My dad worked for companies that sent out 4th class direct mail – he hated when people called it “junk mail.” One month, we collected in a shoebox all the 4th class mail that came into the house. By the middle of that month, we had to empty the box & start over again, there was so much of it. My dad said, “I’ll find another job,” but he didn’t know where, or how or when, just like the mysterious process of seeds that would eventually grow beyond their beginnings. Dad spent the weekend networking, asking people to put in a good word for him, calling former colleagues & employers to see if there were any openings available. It was odd to see dad sitting at the breakfast table on Monday morning and not going to work; the same was true on Tuesday morning. But later that day, Dad got a call about a job offer: it wasn’t in a warehouse, but as a security guard for the town in which we lived. It came with a salary & benefits, & like the seeds in God’s Kingdom, Dad could not have predicted that would be his next job, but it was. & our family’s life went forward.

I learned a lot from those experiences. I learned that sometimes MY mind has TOO SMALL AN IMAGINATION, and that just because I in my own little mind hadn’t imagined a solution doesn’t mean that Jesus hadn’t imagined both the possibility & the solution. I wonder what solutions God has planned for nations that are at war with one another! I wonder what Jesus will have in store for us when we start to listen to each other, rather than shouting past each other, and insisting that our ideas & candidate is the right one. I also learned that Jesus rarely does things on my time schedule, so if I’m married to a clock or calendar or some deadline I’ve imagined in my head, rather than focused on the solution Jesus is preparing for me, I could MISS what He is actually trying to do in a situation, or even in myself.

A few weeks ago, I suggested to people at Mass that Jesus CAN & DOES do amazing things in us & for us, IF WE LET HIM! I repeated that phrase 3 times: IF WE LET HIM. For it’s one thing to say, “I love or believe in Jesus,” but if those are true, he asks us to trust him enough to lead us in the right direction: first closer to God our Creator & deeper into God’s Holy Spirit, and ultimately toward heaven & eternal life. In God’s Word and our reflection together, I hope you heard something that is somehow helpful for your spiritual growth. May the seeds of the Eucharist help us to grow BEYOND this hour, to love others as Jesus loves us. Blessed Be God, who plants good seeds in us through our Savior & Good Shepherd Jesus Christ.