There’s something I’m learning about people.
They’re sort of like sticks.
Allow me to explain.
The climate and surroundings of a person have the potential to utterly destroy them, to the point of sapping the very life from their being, or to cause them to flourish beyond their wildest dreams.
Imagine a stick.
Snapped off from it’s only source of nourishment, it has lost its only purpose in life: to be a conduit for more life.
Unless someone identifies a glimmer of potential in it, it will lay on the compost pile, awaiting a slow disintegration.
Enter the gold digger {someone determined to look for the gold in something/someone rather than highlight the obvious dirt…as expanded on here).
My husband rescued said stick from certain doom, several weeks ago, when he discovered we were short of stakes to mark the vegetable rows.
Into the dirt went the little stick. Surely dead, but still able to be used.
But then…
the climate was right…
the surroundings were right…
and the nutrients needed for survival were present.
Slowly that hopeless little stick started become a tree, surging once again with life.
Just look at that baby grow {it was bare when it went in}!
People are just like this stick.
If only we are willing to take on the ‘job’, we get to be the soil, the nurturing, life-giving plot in which someone is ‘planted’.
We have the potential to spur on tremendous growth and inspire greatness in the lives around us. All the while, maturing and developing ourselves.
Isn’t that something?
What a thrill to know we have the ability, the power if you will, to so profoundly impact the people who, by no coincidence, are in every circle of influence of our lives.
I want to speak life…sow life…invest life into my husband, my best friends, my children, the overwhelmed single-mom down the road, the frazzled, down-trodden sales clerk at Meijer.
I can. I just have to learn to look outside of myself and look for the gold in them, looking for ways to encourage, uplift and love on them.
How about you?
Wanna be soil?
