buried

"Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies..." Tough words. Nothing, nothing good comes easy. Being saved is easy from the pilgrim perspective. Confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. The evidence is everywhere. There is nowhere that you can look without seeing the Designer's signature. "Only a fool says in his heart there is no God." There it is. But, to go beyond that, beyond the altar of forgiveness, it takes something more. What is this seed anyway? Every person is given a gift, something that is deep inside us, that dream, that fire, that passion, that when it is tapped enables us to do more, reach further, to come into a level of living that is beyond what seems natural. This gift is given to us by the Designer and it causes us to hunger for eternal things. If we begin to engage it, it brings us into the eternal realm. Once we go there, we are forever marked, changed because of it. This gift, this seed is faith.

Much has been said and written about faith. People who talk about having faith can mean confidence in their own ability and persistance to attaining some their goal. Others' ideas about faith has to do with some mysterious afterlife, some out-of-body experience that caused them to "have faith" that life on this side is more than we make of it, more than we can see. But those are only shadows, cheap imitations of the real gift that still lies deep within each individual. "Broad is the way that leads to destruction..." 

The vast majority of us never even begin to search for it. Most of us are consumed with trying to please surface demands-measuring up to family expectations, our own expectations, or just getting by and having at least a little superficial enjoyment here and there. It is so easy to go the way of the world, not questioning, not pressing for truth or reason. Its comfortable and very deceptive. But, underneath all that self-satisfied effort and "progressive" dribble, there is the real question of life and the Answer waiting to reveal Himself.

But we keep busy, running around, doing our job, providing for our families, doing some charitable giving, going on vacation, etc. We keep the most amazing, humbling, fulfilling, audacious gift buried under a mountain of musts that never really brings us to the place where we know we have done something that matters, something with roots in the eternal.

"But narrow is the gate and straight is the way that leads to eternal life..." For those few who have dared to dig down into themselves, to find the real kind of faith and to engage it, eureka! Nirvana! All that stuff and more. It takes guts to find it. But it takes more guts to use it, because once its found, it has to be buried in a different place, a place of His choosing, not ours. And to do that, we have to be willing to bury ourselves. We have to die to our dreams and allow them to be buried along with our "old selves" like a kernel of corn dropped into the ground. We have to trust in the promise that He will make it grow and bear fruit. Which will create more seed. What to do with my seed of faith? I have to bury it.