Mustard Seed prayers

It’s always appealed to me that Jesus used stories to help people ponder what the Kingdom of God might be like. He gives us images to explore, space to play and room to use our imaginations!

A famous example is this: “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

So few words, yet so many ways they can be understood in each new age, in each new situation; it’s worth pondering what a sheltering tree might signify in our world as it experiences such extraordinary hostilities and fearfulness.

Recently, however, I heard it interpreted in a way I hadn’t considered before. Mustard was grown as a crop at time of Jesus but it also grows as a weed, just finding itself places to spring up, where it wasn’t planned or intended. We experience many such places in the fabric of our days, cracks in time – as we brush our teeth, stop at traffic lights, sit in waiting rooms or queue in the supermarket, as we wait for our computer to load, or someone to answer our call as canned music plays; so many tiny moments when we are forced to pause in the midst of our busy lives.

Into these cracks of “waiting,” we could plant tiny seeds of prayer; expressions of gratitude, a simple ‘Thank you’ or a ‘Glory be to God’, for something we treasure; or an appeal for help – “Keep me safe” or “Watch over so and so” which could channel some of our anxieties. It could simply be a prayer for those immediately around us even if we don’t even know their names – someone looking tired, worried, or unwell, total strangers.

Into any uncomfortable, irritating time of waiting, we can plant a prayer, however simple, and so allow God into the weave of our day. If we all did that a little more, sowing prayers into all the cracks, they might grow like mustard seeds into trees that provide spiritual shelter and sustenance, both for us and for others.

Revd Kate McFarlane