Marijuana Seeds and Sunflowers

For many years I used to smoke heaps of weed (marijuana). In those days I thought it would be a good joke to play on my home town if I was to plant marijuana seeds along the roadside and in the front gardens of houses all around the town. So I began to go out for walks at around midnight with marijuana seeds in my pocket.

And I began planting these seeds in people’s front gardens. I thought it would be really funny to see hundreds of marijuana plants start growing all over town. As took these walks I began to notice that there seemed to be a lot of police cars around the streets at that time of night. I noticed that I was the only person walking around at midnight, and I started to feel very conspicuous. The bag of seeds in my pocket began to make me nervous as the police cars seemed to slow down near me.  I decided that this wasn’t such a good idea after all. After I stopped though, I missed it, because it seemed like such a good joke, to plant all these seeds. I resolved to do it again, only this time… with sunflowers.

I went to the pet shop, and bought two large bags of sunflower seeds. I calculated that I must have had about twenty thousand seeds. Every night for the next few weeks I went out with pockets full of these seeds. I sprinkled them around the roadsides, planted them in people’s front gardens, dispersed them around parks, on roundabouts, everywhere that I could think of. In one public playground where I scattered some seeds I noticed that the fence of the park bordered the house of some friends of our family. They were the only people in the whole town that I knew were born again Christians. I thought I would scatter some seeds in their back garden, over the fence of the playground. For some reason though, I took only one seed, and flicked it over the fence.

Some six weeks later I imagined by now that they must be gloriously shooting up all over the town, so took some daytime walks retracing my steps, to look for them. I went everywhere, and was mightily disappointed to find that not one had grown! Not one. The whole lot had been infertile. What a waste of time!

Some three months later we were invited around to these friends’ house (the Christians) for a barbeque. We didn’t see them very often, because we couldn’t relate to the fact that they really believed in Jesus Christ.  When I went in to their back yard I was startled to see one enormous sunflower. It must have been seven feet tall, and the flower itself was well over a foot wide! As I stood staring up at it in shock Barry said to me. “It just grew by itself. When it first started to grow, we thought it was a marijuana plant.”

I was stunned. The initial reference to a marijuana plant got my attention ‘cause that was what it was originally going to be). Then I thought to myself “Out of twenty thousand seeds this is the only one that grew! It didn’t just survive, it’s massive! And these are the only people who are Christians… But that can’t mean what is seems to mean. It just can’t.” At that moment, I suppose there was a faint breeze. The large head of the sunflower began to nod at me. I was thinking “No. It can’t be. It can’t…” It just kept nodding.

For a few days that really got to me. The odds against those things stacking up like that were huge. It must mean something mustn’t it? If it did, I would have to start searching, trying to find out what I could about this God of the Christians. But I didn’t want to. I asked my Mum “Don’t you think that’s incredible that the house with the only seed to grow out of those twenty thousand dead seeds was the house of the Christians?” She said “No.”

“Phew!” I thought. That was a relief. So I forgot about it. When God speaks gently and we turn away, we will lose what he gave us. My life went much further away from God.

Some ten years later, straight after the events on the home page happened, it came back to me.