We Keep Looking for Trees While God Plants Seeds
Learning to recognise the work of the Kingdom
Welcome to today’s reflection.
Each weekday, paid subscribers receive an exclusive reflection designed to offer a thoughtful pause amid ordinary life. My prayer is that these brief pieces create a little space for curiosity, contemplation and wonder amid the noise of the day.
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During my years in parish ministry, I collected all manner of things I thought might be useful one day.
Books, cables, bits of equipment, old photographs, forgotten gifts, resources for projects I fully intended to begin and various objects whose original purpose has now been lost to history.
Most of them went into the garage, and once they were there, I promptly forgot about them.
Parish ministry rarely left much time for sorting through boxes or finally beginning those vaguely imagined projects. There was always another meeting, service, phone call, funeral, school assembly or pastoral crisis demanding attention. The garage became a kind of holding area for good intentions.
Of course, when we eventually moved, all that stuff moved with us.
More recently, with a little more time and focus, I have begun going through some of those boxes and trying to work out what I actually have. I expected most of it to be rubbish, and, to be fair, some of it certainly was. There are only so many unidentified chargers and stick-on air fresheners a human needs.
But I have also been genuinely delighted by what I have found.
There are things that are not merely interesting but meaningfully useful in my everyday life. Objects I had forgotten I owned have suddenly found a purpose. Things that sat untouched for years are now bringing me pleasure, helping me with my writing or reminding me of people and moments I had forgotten.
I keep wondering how the former version of me could have let them sit in a garage for so long.
Yet I suppose that is the point. They were there all the time. Their value had not disappeared. I had simply stopped noticing them.
It has become a small reminder that the things capable of bringing us joy are often much closer than we imagine. We spend so much time searching for something new that we can overlook what is already under our noses.
