Submitted by John Ralph on Wed, 01/05/2011 - 9:41am.
This was sent to me as a New Year's gift. "A seed is a very small thing." I have no idea who wrote it but it rings true.
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A seed is a very small thing.
You plant it, and in that secret place under the earth, if feeds from the soil, it breaks, and then a shoot comes up from the ground.
This small shoot seeks the light as it grows, and in time, it turns into a large tree. If you had not been told, you would not believe this tree came from such a small thing that once was hidden in the depths.
We cannot see what happens under the soil, because it is hidden from our eyes. Only the seed is present when the change happens. But eventually we see a tree, which cannot be ignored.
We do not consider the strength that resides within the seed because it is such a small thing. But we cannot ignore the tree.
This is an illustration of a certain belief that we fall into very easily, because it makes sense when we first think about it. It is the idea that our private lives should not matter to anyone but ourselves.
We look at our private lives as hidden from view, and we think they add no meaning whatsoever to the lives we live in public.
We say things like "whatever a man does in his private life is nobody's business."
Even more so, whatever a man thinks in his own head, in the deepest recesses of his mind, has little or no influence on the way that he behaves in public.
The truth is that those things which we do in private, even our thought life, matter more than anything else we do in life.
Because our private thoughts are like seeds.
They are planted in our heads. During that time, no one but we are able to