Planting Seeds

Many of you wont know about one of my hobbies that I keep under wraps most of the time. It came about when my mum moved house and she asked me to help do up her garden. Over the past 18 months I have undertaken the arduous task of digging up and landscaping it (I know it's quite sad) but I have developed a real enjoyment for this work. I have discovered that there is something very rewarding about being involved in nature which I had previously found whilst hill or coastal walking. Anyway I have spent much of the week working in a local school running some trips and doing some group work around social skills. By the time I finished there I couldn't help but wonder actually how much good the work that I had been involved with has been doing. I found myself getting quite down about this until I remembered a poem given to me by my line manager Tony Cant, re-reading this helped me to start to put things into context. So the link between gardening and youth work? I hope you'll see that in the poem below.

This is what we are about, We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces affects far beyond our capacities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realising that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end
results, but the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers not master builders, ministers, not Messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

Amen!