He Knows Not How, and It Grows Anyway

The kitchen table has a groove worn along one edge where a chair has been pushed in and out ten thousand times, and if you run your thumb along it you can feel exactly where everybody sits.

Twenty past seven. Homework. The younger one is doing sums with a pencil that keeps needing sharpening because he presses too hard, and the older one is upstairs allegedly doing something and is probably not.

She is helping. Sitting on the corner chair with her tea gone cold, explaining a number line for the third time this week, and the third time is going about as well as the first two.

And in the middle of it, quietly, the thing she thinks about most often arrives.

I have no idea whether any of this is going in.

Not just the sums. All of it. The praying at bedtime that has been going on since they were babies and that the older one now endures. The talking about God in the car when something comes up. The way she has tried to do things in front of them rather than at them. Years of it. Sowing, sowing, sowing, into what looks to her like a completely flat field.

And it is worse than doubt, because doubt would at least be a question. This is more like a slow, tired conclusion.

Come and sit on the corner chair with me. Because Jesus told a short parable, one that almost nobody preaches, and it is about exactly this and it says something extraordinary about the farmer.

The one where the farmer sleeps

Four verses in Mark and then it is gone. No allegory afterward, no explanation to the disciples in private.

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:26

He knoweth not how.

That is the phrase. It is not a criticism of the farmer, and it is not describing a bad farmer or a lazy one. It is describing what farming actually is: you put the seed in, and then a process runs that you did not design, cannot observe and could not accelerate, and you go to bed.

The parable is deliberately built to remove the farmer from the growing. He sleeps and rises, night and day, and the thing happens in ground he cannot see into.

You are sowing into ground you were never given eyes into, and the parable makes the farmer's not knowing part of the design. That is not a soft word to a tired mother; Mark 4:27 says he knoweth not how and does not treat it as a fault, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a farming parable and lays it across a kitchen table with a groove worn in the edge. You are not failing to see the growth. You were never given a window.

Now the second half, and it is the sentence I actually want you to keep.

You said you do not know whether any of it is going in. That is true and it will stay true and there is no method that will fix it. But notice what you have done with that uncertainty: you have treated it as evidence of absence. No visible growth, therefore no growth.

The parable was told to people who would have made exactly that mistake, and it exists to stop them making it. The seed springs and grows up while he does not know how. The not knowing and the growing are simultaneous in the sentence.

You have been reading your own blindness as a report on the field, and in that parable the growing happens during the not knowing. Mark 4:28 says the earth brings forth fruit of herself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that sequence a comfort in a kitchen rather than an agricultural note. There are stages down there that look like nothing from up here.

What is actually happening at that table

Let me be careful, because I will not tell you your children will turn out a particular way. I do not know and neither does anybody who tells you they do, and promising you that would be a cruelty dressed as encouragement.

Here is what I can tell you, and it is more solid than a prediction.

Something is being sown. That is not a hope, it is an observation about what you have been doing at bedtime for years. And the word sown is not inert. His word does not return void (Isaiah 55:11). It goes out and it does the thing it was sent for, on a schedule that is not published to the sower.

Your children have heard the name of Jesus said with love, in a kitchen, by somebody they know is not performing. That is in them. Where it is and what it is doing is not visible to you and was never going to be.

You have put something living into them, and living things are not required to report their progress. Isaiah 55:11 says His word shall not return unto Him void but shall accomplish that which He pleases, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the accomplishing, in a child, over years, without a receipt.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it has been doing more at that table than you think.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. And He picked, again, a seed. Not the visible results of your parenting. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.