Stir into flame the Gift of God

 

Two of Christianity’s earliest saints Timothy and Titus were converts from Judaism and beloved companions of Paul, whose letters of instruction and encouragement to each would eventually become part of the New Testament.  Together with Mark’s depiction of Christ’s teaching through the parable of the farmer who went out sowing [Mark 4:1-20], their lives remind me of the graces and the challenges of conversion.

We tend to think of conversion as happening to someone else, someone not born into the faith, when actually God’s loving creation and conversion is taking place within each of us, not merely every day but over and over every day.  Over and over, He sends His Spirit to teach, to guide, to call, to convert; indeed, to change me evermore completely into His image. 

The Parable of the Sower begins with the line: “Hear this! A sower went out to sow.” [Mark 4:3]   The details of this parable are that the sower sows seed on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns and ultimately on good soil.  The story reveals that we must strive to be like that “good soil” in that we must receive the Word of God into our souls, allowing it to be nurtured so that it may grow in abundance.

But this parable reveals something more that could easily be missed.  It reveals the simple fact that the sower, in order to plant at least some seed in good and fertile soil, must act.  He must act by going forth spreading seed in abundance.  As he does this, he mustn’t become disheartened if the majority of the seed he’s sown fails to reach that good soil.  The path, the rocky ground, and the thorny ground all are places where seed is sown but ultimately dies.  Only one of the four places identified in this parable produces growth.

Jesus is the Divine Sower, and His Word is the Seed.  We should realize that we’re also called to act in His person by sowing the seed of His Word in our own lives.  Just as He’s willing to sow with the realization that not every seed will produce fruit, so we also must be ready and willing to accept this same fact. 

The truth is that, very often, the labor we offer to God for the building up of His Kingdom produces little or no manifest fruit in the end.  Hearts become hardened and the good we do, or the Word we share, doesn’t grow.

One lesson we must take from this parable—and St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy—is that the spreading of the Gospel requires effort and commitment on our part.  We must be willing to toil and labor for the Gospel despite whether or not people are willing to receive it.  And we mustn’t allow ourselves to become discouraged if the results aren’t what we had hoped for.  

The question, of course, is how receptive to God’s conversion are we?  When that Sower comes down our row, how do we receive the seeds He showers on us?  Are they carried away by the demons we’ve allowed into our life?  Is our faith so superficial that they’re soon blown away by what Paul calls our “share of the hardship which the gospel entails?” [2 Timothy 1:1-8] Are they eventually smothered by our absorption with career, status, security, even leisure?  In the end, what’s the yield from God’s gifts in our life, our relationships, and our treatment of others?

This constant call to conversion can certainly sound like hard duty.  And sometimes it is.  The trick is to accept the challenge with joy, “to stir into flame the gift of God.”  By so doing, the promised rewards are great from the Spirit who “is no cowardly spirit, but rather one that makes us strong, loving and wise.”  God asks nothing more and nothing less of us.