Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 268 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Life is Like a Seed #1

Thank you for joining us for our 7 days a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 268 of our trek, and yesterday we discovered 9 lessons learned from hiking the mountains. Today and for the next couple of days on our hike, we want to understand how Life is Like a Seed. If you miss any of our Wisdom-Trek episodes, please go to Wisdom-Trek.com to listen to them and read the daily journal.

We are recording our podcast from our studio at The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. Sunday evening was filled with laughter and squeals as we had five of our six grandchildren over for the evening. We had pizza and watermelon for dinner and then Gramps was changed into a monster, as I chased the kids all over the house in an attempt to catch them. By the end of the evening, my throat and body were a bit sore from all the monster growling and being piled on by the kids as they tried to free the captured ones. It was a great evening together.

Anytime we have the opportunity to impact our grandchildren positively we certainly want to plant those seeds within them. Fortunately, they all have very strong and loving homes, and we can reinforce good principles in their lives. This is an important part of living our legacy each day.

As we consider planting those good seeds within our grandchildren’s lives, on our hike today we want to begin a short series that will allow us to consider how…

Life is Like a Seed

· God instructs us to learn spiritual principles from Creation. Have you considered the example of the seed?

Let time travel forward a couple of months and imagine that it is now springtime! Farmers are busy planting their fields. Gardeners are cleaning up their yards and preparing their gardens. They are taking little seeds and placing them in the ground so that they will grow into beautiful flowers and fruitful plants. There is nothing quite like a bouquet of fresh flowers or the taste of fresh vegetables from your own garden!

Growing up on the farm, our primary crop was apples from the 40 acres of apple trees in our orchard. We also had a very large vegetable and flower garden that we all worked in. Regardless if the plant was an apple tree, corn stalk, or hollyhock flower, each one starts with a seed of the same kind of plant.

Seeds come in different shapes and sizes, with each type having different requirements for germination (the process in which seeds sprout and begin to grow). Small seeds must be placed as delicately as possible in the soil so that they do not get buried too deep. They are usually planted together in groups, ensuring that some will grow into thriving plants. Larger seeds, on the other hand, are buried deeper and generally with fewer in a group. Some seeds prefer warm, dry environments while others require environments that are cold and moist. There are seeds that will germinate in less than five days while others will take five months—or even longer!

Because there is a wide range of seed types, man has learned a seemingly endless variety of methods to cause seeds to sprout and grow. One common treatment is exposing the seed to a cold, almost freezing, temperature for a specific length of time, mimicking winter. Certain seeds, such as some carnivorous plants from Australia or some pine cones germinate when they are exposed to fire. Some germinate when immersed in water. Others, such as Cyclamen, germinate when they are kept in the dark for a certain period. Hard-shell seeds must be scarred or cracked. Some seeds can sit dormant for several years before something triggers them to germinate.

As you will come to see,