Finding Personal Meaning in the Parable of the Sower

Good question. The parable has meant different things to me at different times in my life. More recently I take it as saying — not too far off what it has represented in the past — that the teachings of Jesus will be accepted differently by different people. Some are not able to digest and assimilate the true intent of the message, meaning they represent the hard or rocky ground. Others really take to it and feel nourished by it, and grow and flower. Others have competing forces that drown out or choke the life out of Christ’s message.

The real heart of what matters, to me, is WHAT IS Christ’s message? With the view or feeling that much of what we hear and read of church is of divine source mixed with the thoughts of men – understanding which of the elements are truly divine then becomes a priority. Am I fertile ground for divine seeds — or am I fertile ground for philosophies of men?

I thought some might interpret it this way. I thought of Alma 32 when I was pondering the parable. Reading them together provides some insights about how to make ourselves receptive to seed-planting through spiritual nourishment.

The other meaning that came to me (which is more potent) is that the Parable of the Sower is really a prescription for avoiding the kind of frustration that racked my soul when I was in the throes of leaving my last calling as HPGL (sounds dramatic, doesn’t it). I reached the conclusion that the parable was teaching us to LOOK FOR FERTILE GROUND. For me, that means avoiding low-value-added initiatives that rarely ever bear fruit when there are situations which are ready for seeds.

Examples of stony ground:

1. Expecting home teaching to turn up immediate fruit in terms of activity/families returning to Church. Much of the time it’s watering without planting.

2. Focus families. I never saw one family respond do our activation efforts — not one, and we tried. It only brought the Ward leadership down to constantly be churning the list, getting rejected, picking new people for more hit and run attempts at activation.

3. Working with member families that had no interest in missionary work, expecting them to produce referrals for missionaries.

4. Trying to make brethren who hate home teaching do it.

Examples of Fertile Ground

1. Visiting new move-ins. I turned up a ton of teaching appointments from these new move-ins as people in these situations tend to be in a frame of mind that is more open to change since they just moved.

2. Putting all our resources into people who spontaneously come back to Church.

3. Working only with missionary minded people in the Ward. And most of the time, this involved people who had a sales background. Not always, but at a minimum, they had a sales kind of orientation about them. So when you talked about missionary work, they were on the same level of motivation.

4. Work closely with the ones who care about it and get the most out of those situations. It was these brethren that I PPI’s regularly about home teaching because it usually led to something productive.

5. Fashion your plan as a leader around the natural passions and interest of your brethren — they will do more when iniatives speak to their current passions and spirituality than when you dream them up yourself, and impose them on them.

My Bishop was a plodder and said the moral of the parable was just to “keep sowing”. I think it’s about learning where to place your efforts for greatest impact.

I tend to look at the seeds as ideas, and not as whole people. Some look at it from the perspective of whole people. Christ plants a seed in their heart, or they are the seed, and they either sink or swim.

It works better for me to see the seeds as little ideas. Does an idea grow in our heart? Does it not? Perhaps the seed isn’t right for our soil. Perhaps we are not the right soil for the seed (it wasn’t intended for us). I can go in lots of directions with that.