A Miracle In Action

So I can't remember my first experience with planting seeds.  It may have been very early in elementary school a project we had in which we planted a seed in a paper Dixie cup and watched it grow.  I was awestruck.  How could this dead bean swell up, burst the seed coat and send out a root and a crooked sprout that first yielded a cotyledon, followed closely by the unfurling of the first leaf that followed the sun and grew and grew and grew?

I was hooked.  I planted everything I could get my hands on.  I went outside one evening after supper and planted my fruit cocktail.  Seriously.  My Dad is a rice farmer and each night I would empty out his rubber boots, collect the rice that was in them and I would plant that rice in miniature rice fields I had constructed in the back yard, flooding the 'field' and watching the rice grow.  After it began growing, I would pretend farm with my John Deere toy tractors and combines.

We've all heard the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.  In the fairy tale, Jack trades his family's milk cow for some magic beans.  Jack's mother, furious about how poor a negotiator her son was for not coming home with any money, threw the beans on the ground.  Overnight the beans grew and grew and grew.

Truth be told, putting any ordinary seed into the ground and watching it grow is no less magical to me! As I was weeding in the garden this afternoon, I couldn't help but admire the humble bean plant below.  This beautiful bean plant was, just a few days ago, that hard, white, dead lowly bean that you see in the ground in the photo above.  You really can't help in just marveling over the miracle of the seed.

Not only will this seed grow, but it reproduces itself exponentially by creating more seeds - just as the Bible verse says below:

Genesis 1:11 King James Version (KJV)

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

I'm now 50 years old, but I'm still as awestruck today by the miracle of the lowly seed as I was decades ago when I first watched my bean seed growing in my Dixie cup.  Romans 1:20 tells us that since the beginning of Creation, His attributes, power, and nature, have been clearly seen by what He has made, that we are without excuse.  I believe we can see the power and wonder of God by simply observing the miracle of the seed!