Calamity and confusion, death has come to our family. We were buried and all but forgotten.
This became a mass grave. So many. We once shared a home together, and I knew them all. In the end me, my friends and family were consigned to a horrible fate.
I watched as the men buried us alive. I saw the dirt roll effortlessly over everyone I knew and loved. Then it rolled over me. Death came quickly enough.
Then, glory of glories, I began to feel the heat of the morning sun rising on the killing fields! I saw something unexpected, something remarkable. There was new life growing from each grave, slender green shoots reaching skyward from the very place we fell in our final throes of death.
As time passed, a veritable forest grew over our graves. The ground was not to be seen through the leaves, stocks and cobs.
One day I raised my voice and called to those around me and an absolute choir returned my call. There were more out there than had been taken in the spring and they understood my unique voice.
I was transported to the greatest concert hall I had ever been in and it came from what was once a cemetery. The wind added its own special melody as the voices rose in majestic splendor. The songs were new and haunting, they were old and familiar and I sang with those who had given harmonious voice to such diverse emotions that took me from sheer melancholy to intense joy.
Time marched along relentlessly and soon the beautiful sea of green began to whither as the air grew cold. The wind rattled our stocks as if they were old men’s bones. I lamented the seeming death song that played over our lives of promise.
One day, large machines came and desecrated the hallowed field of summer, stocks were severed from the ground and leaves scattered to the chilling winds. Would the beautiful song ever come again? I recalled the grave and the promise of hope. Perhaps there was more to this journey.
I refused to share my bitterness with those around me; they had seen the carnage and stubbornly declined to be troubled by it all.
Each of us were ruthlessly ripped from the cob and thoughtlessly poured back in the home of winter. A flood of new life flowed in and around me and perfect kernels left their songs of summer for a family gathering unlike anything I had ever seen.
In that moment I wept for joy, for the very death for which I had so bitterly grieved was the very thing needed to bring new life to the farm. The very sacrifice made, yielded something that never even occurred to me to dream of.
Has mankind ever experienced such joy?
John 12:24 The truth is, a kernel ... must be planted in the soil. Unless it dies it will be alone--a single seed. But its death will produce many new kernels--a plentiful harvest of new lives.
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