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# The sower
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-sower/
- Published: 2026-08-20T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional, Week 13, #097, #children SS, #medium

*"We will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done." — Psalm 78:4*

The curriculum is spread across the kitchen table and I am looking at it the way I look at the garden in March, which is to say I am looking at what is not there yet and imagining what it will become.

I pulled the folder from the filing cabinet at the church office on Monday. Forty-nine years of folders. Forty-nine years of lessons and stories and the same questions asked by different children in different chairs with the same carpet underneath them. The curriculum changes. The children change. The room does not change. The work does not change.

I am sitting with the fall quarter now. September through November. The parables, mostly. The sower. The mustard seed. The lost sheep. Stories I have told so many times that I could tell them without the book, and sometimes I do, because the children listen differently when you tell the story from inside your own mouth instead of from inside a page.

I am thinking about the sower this morning. The seed falls on the path and the birds take it. The seed falls on the rocks and it springs up and dies. The seed falls among the thorns and the thorns choke it. The seed falls on good soil and it produces. I have told this story to eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds and ten-year-olds for forty-nine years and I have never once told them which soil they are. That is not the point. The point is that the sower goes out and sows. The sower does not test the soil first. The sower does not take a sample and send it to a lab. The sower throws the seed and walks away and trusts.

That is what I do. I throw the seed. I have been throwing seed for forty-nine Septembers and I have walked away forty-nine times and I do not know what grew. Some of it grew. I know this because Olivia, who has sat in that circle every time she has visited since she was seven, still prays. I know this because a woman stopped me at the grocery store and told me she remembered what I said about being brave. The seed took. Not all of it. Not most of it. But some of it, and some of it is enough.

The children come back in four weeks. I will be ready. The felt board will be ready and the crayons will be in the coffee can and the circle will be eight chairs and the carpet will be the same carpet and the story will be the same story and the children will be new, and that is the whole arrangement, and it is good.

*Lord, I am still sowing. I will leave the growing to you.*