While He Sleeps: Mark 4:26-29

"This is what the kingdom of God is like," Jesus said, and the farmers leaned in.

"A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how."

Picture it: the farmer tosses seed into turned earth, then goes home. He eats dinner. He sleeps. He wakes and works at other tasks. Days pass. Weeks. And beneath the soil, invisible to human eyes, something miraculous unfolds.

The seed cracks. A pale root threads downward. A green shoot pushes up, breaking through the crust of earth into sunlight. The farmer did not make it happen. He could not make it happen. He provided the seed, the soil, the water—but the life? The growth? That mystery belonged to God alone.

"All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head."

First. Then. Then. Stages that cannot be rushed, growth that cannot be forced. The farmer watches, waits, tends what he can tend—but the miracle happens while he sleeps.

"As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come."

The kingdom works the same way. We scatter the seed of the word. We water where we can. We pray through long nights of apparent silence. And then, in God's time, the harvest comes—full heads of grain bowing heavy, ready for gathering.

We cannot force it. We cannot hurry it. We can only scatter, tend, and trust the One who makes things grow.