“Oooooooh The Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the food I need
The sun and the rain and the appleseed
The Lord is good to me
Amen Amen Amen Amen Aaaaaamen”
The Johnny Appleseed song is a favorite at our table. John Chapman became an American legend in his own lifetime traveling west planting apple trees, preaching and living a radical gospel as he went. a special friend to the Indians and to the animals.
I remember years ago walking down the street to a neighbor’s house to give him a CD. I was finishing off an apple and as I tossed the core with it’s seeds onto the ground. Father said to me, “You’re a Johnny Appleseed’ I realized I was to sow the seed of God’s word in the form of the songs He had given me.
Even this week I got a couple of emails one from a brother in Australia saying, “We still sing your songs in our community” and another from a lady in Arizona saying she’d worn out my CDs! What a privilege and honor!
Father also showed me that the even more than my songs, my sons (and daughters) were seeds He would sow in this new world.
Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (Jn.12:24)
Job was a religious man at the beginning of the book by his name, but God did a job on Job and he ended up a spiritual man with a first hand experience of his Dad’s smiling face. “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” (Job 42:5)
God allowed Job to be wounded in his body, in his pocket book and in his closest human relationships. It was the inevitable journey for all of us, through humility, to intimacy with our Father. At the end of the story Job was doubly fruitful!!
One of Robin’s permaculture apple tree plants, on the boarder between our house and Ben and Kim’s, surprised us all this year by bearing in it’s third year 9 little Minnesotan originated Honeycrisp apples! (pictured above)
As I pondered this I realized these nine apples represented our family of nine. I recounted how each one of us have been given a unique wound and as we have embraced that wound it has become a gift. Firstly a gift to us shaping who we are and are becoming as children of God and then a gift through us, just as Job at the end of the story, became the gift of an effective intercessor for his friends.
Biting through the hard wounded skin comes the crispness….then the sweetness!
My wound? To see the suffering of my children and so to know our Father’s broken heart for His creation.
As I was running and ruminating over these things this morning, I came across another golf ball message from the Father, Son and Spirit about how through these hard experiences the law of God is being written on our hearts as the new covenant reality – just as was promised in Jeremiah 33:31-34.
Reinhart means “hardy advice” : – )