June prompt: seed

It’s  springtime where I live and time to plant seed.

The Bible first refers to seed way back in Genesis when God created plants and described their seediness:”Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself…'” (Genesis 1:11). God’s blessing and favour was seen in seed reproducing abundantly (Isaiah 30:23).

Bible writers sometimes referred to literal seed. They used seeds to describe the look of manna (“… it was like white coriander seed… – Genesis 47:24), the beginnings of the kingdom of heaven (“the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed … which indeed is the least of all the seeds” – Matthew 13:31), and the tiny amount of faith needed to perform miracles (“‘I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed … nothing will be impossible for you'” Matthew 17:20).

Seed is also used as a metaphor, often for the word of God and its unstoppable spread and growth (Isaiah 55:10-11; Matthew 13:3-9, 18-23).

Finally, Paul talks about how our post-resurrection bodies  will be as different from our earthly bodies as plants are different from the seeds out of which they grow (1 Corinthians 15:38,42).

This month, let’s write about seed.

• We might write about the physical planting of seeds in our current garden or the gardens we remember from our childhood. We might write about what we did with various non-garden seeds—how we blew dandelion parachutes into each other’s faces, or stamped on puffballs to raise clouds of spores.

• We might compare the look of a particular seed to something it resembles.

• We might go metaphorical and write about what germinated from an act of kindness (or cruelty), how someone’s gift of money or help was a seed to our success, or about the process of God’s word germinating in our hearts.

• Or we might riff on how a seed action produced a result entirely unlike itself.

Hopefully this prompt will be the seed of an idea that becomes a story, personal anecdote, essay or poem.

Happy writing!