Every seed has a harvest if we'll watch it grow

​I grew up on a farm. One of the greatest joys of that was watching seeds become plants that ultimately became harvest. Every fall, when the big machines would take the crops from the field, it was easy to remember that just months earlier those fields were endless rows of sprouts.

I wish I'd known as a kid the symbolism I was witnessing. I wish I'd known just how often that cycle would repeat itself in my life.

Seed. Grow. Harvest.

And I wish I'd known that not all seeds are easy to watch grow. That even though the seeds in the fields around me more often than not grew up with limited obstacles and were a joy to watch grow, not all of life's seeds grow so unencumbered.

There have been many seeds in my life I could have never imagined growing into a harvest. As a result, I think, I spent a lot of time believing the seed was the story. And since that story at times felt dead, like an enemy, I never saw those seeds as something that would grow.

Believing anyplace we are is the starting point for growth and not the end, that is hope. Hope is always the fuel we need to keep going.

Going to the harvest.

I had a significant gambling issue in my younger years. To support it, I got good at stealing from people. And lying to them. You destroy a lot of things on the way to destroying yourself.

I remember one day driving home from a horse track. I'd lost a lot of money, money that I'd stolen. It's one of the first and most vivid memories I have of wanting to end my life.

Drive off the road and be done with it all. It honestly felt like the best option among none.

I didn't drive off the road. I'm not sure why. I don't have some God came down and took wheel story. I just didn't do it.

That day is a dark day in a life full of them. It would have been impossible for me to have ever seen that day as a seed.

The other day I was talking to a dad friend. He was talking about a young person who has been experimenting with online gambling. He said it seems harmless, but he's starting to worry, at least a little, that the young person might be a little too into it.

I told him the story about the harmless two dollar wager I made at a horse track a few decades ago. I told him how quickly harmless goes from simply fun and experiment to driving while trying to determine the best destination, home or into a tree.

As more and more people have access to gambling, and face the challenges it brings, I am given more and more opportunities to share my experience.

I am given more and more opportunities to feel a day I wanted to call it quits as the day a seed was planted.

I don't think God scripted it that way. I don't think my seed to harvest path when it comes to gambling was anyone's plan.

It was just life.

And life doesn't always look like a smooth road. It sometimes looks like a dark one you don't want to be on.

The key is to, as often as you can, recognize everything is a seed. Even the seeds we can't possibly imagine growing into anything, they will. They will if we can begin to imagine them as a harvest story and not a death story.

I don't know what you're struggling with today. Maybe for some of you it's a really dark struggle. I don't want you to imagine what the harvest might look like from that darkness; it's impossible to imagine in many cases.

But I do want you to believe in a harvest.

Believe that one is waiting for you. Believe that you are a part of a seed that is growing you and not ending you.

Believe that one day you will be telling the story about some of your deepest shame or guilt or grief or hardship and realize the thing you couldn't stand being a part of, the seed you couldn't bare to watch grow, it miraculously became a beautiful harvest.

Not all seeds are easy to watch grow.

But every seed can become a harvest.

Believe it.