Not long ago, I began to wonder about the seeds we sow—not the tidy, intentional ones we press into the soil with high expectations, but the ones scattered by the wind. The ones blown far beyond our view, which we don’t track or even remember.
Those are the seeds God keeps.
In the parables, we often focus on the soil, but perhaps the mystery is the point. Not everything worth knowing can be diagrammed or measured. I remember a moment at a lunch—no strategy, no “ministry” mindset—where a stranger told me she found her way to faith because she simply overheard the joy in my voice years prior.
It was a seed sown without a plan. A flower blooming in a neighbor’s yard that I never intended to plant.
We are conditioned to count: followers, conversions, and visible outcomes. But the real fruit of a life is often invisible. It germinates in places we will never visit and takes root in people we have long forgotten.
Heaven may very well be full of strangers holding fruit that we helped plant without ever knowing it. This is the beauty of quiet kingdom work:
We sow generously, not because we can predict the harvest.
We sow faithfully, because we know the Sower.
We trust that God waters what we forget.
We must stop trying to calculate outcomes or control the soil of others. Our work is simply to stay faithful in the planting. Our smallest words carry a divine weight when caught in the Spirit and carried to soil we never touched.
So we keep sowing. Not for the applause of the harvest we see, but for the glory of the one God is growing in the secret places.