In the spring of 1964 I was five years old. I was standing in Grannie Neal’s flower bed with a hoe in my hand. I was busy weeding around the flowers. Grannie was a tiny little lady, about 4’9″ and 160lbs., who lived next to the parsonage and babysat me while my dad and mom worked.

She looked at me with her sweet smile and said “Robert Harold, you be careful with that hoe. It’s really sharp.” “Oh, Grannie, I was raised on a farm” was my reply. It was a lie. She knew exactly where I had been raised and it wasn’t twenty yards from her back door. But, she gave me a big hug and a kiss and left me to my “work”.

I don’t know anything about farming. My friend, Phil Baugh, has taught me more about it than anyone else. One thing I’ve learned from being around the rice farm with Phil is that it doesn’t take much seed to produce a hug crop harvest.

You see, when you planet one grain of rice it produces a plant. That plant produces several shoots with multiple heads on each shoot. The heads are made up of many, many, many seeds. So, the return on your seed is over one hundred fold per. That’s the law of the harvest. Think of an apple tree or a corn stalk or a grape vine. The same principle applies to all of these.

So when we read in Galatians “Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest” it means that the misery will come up in bundles. One unrighteous action can create a huge harvest of pain. We have to be very careful about the things we fertilize and cultivate and plant in our lives.

But there is a good side to all this. If you plant good things in your life then they will create a great harvest of peace and joy and celebration. It just depends on what you plant most in the garden of your life.

So, today, choose your seed wisely. Sow carefully. Water with prayer, generously. Cultivate and fertilize them vigorously. Weed them out often. But do one thing for me; be careful with the hoe, it’s sharp.