Seeds Bearing Fruit

The book our small group is reading suggests that truth comes to us in “seed” form, and has not done its work unless it is planted and grows to bear fruit in our life.

“What is one book, or class, or teaching that has really influenced you?” asks Lisa, one of our leaders. What are the things that put down their roots and break up the hard soil within us, penetrating our souls, then grow up to make the connection to the light and life outside of us which we so desperately need? What seeds have borne fruit in our lives?

She offered as an example the big hit of a few years back, Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God. Everybody grumbled about the repetition and simplicity of it – remember all those fill-in-the-blank questions? – but you couldn’t come away from it without having gotten the point, which is to continually be asking, “Where is God at work and how can I be part of it?” Lisa thinks that way now.

So here’s the essay question. What is one (or more) book, or class, or teaching that has really influenced you? Particularly, I think, what has influenced your view of God, the world, and yourself?

I’m sure there are many that shape us in more ambiguous ways. I wrote last spring about the steady diet of a certain kind of children’s lit I consumed as a child, and wondered if I learned the wrong lessons about personal power and responsibility. (I never doubted I could change the world. That may be why I have a hard time being content with the mediocrity and failure that characterize so much of life between the bright spots!)

But one small thing that’s made a big difference in my life on that front is the little booklet My Heart Christ’s Home. Someone – Tim Snow, the youth pastor? – sent it home with my mom for me, after we’d visited his church. I was just 13 years old, standing on the outside of the world of faith and grace, looking in. It offered me a picture that I wanted to move toward, a picture of how friendship with God might be possible and how it could unfold. And of course seeing that seed bearing fruit in the lives of others in that church was what really made the difference.

What else? The Perspectives program, of course, a decade later; and in my late 20’s a (now out of print) mentoring program from Kingdom Building Ministries called The Laborer’s Network and featuring teaching by Tim Elmore.

What about the last decade or so? So many books, classes, sermon series, Bible studies - many of which seemed rich and meaningful. But has anything shaped me as much as these?