Introduction: Sunday, I had a long drive to speak at a church in my state. The location was near where I grew up. It’s in the farm belt section of our state, where there are more rows of peanut fields than there are apartment complexes and subdivisions. After I exited from I-75 south to take secondary state highways to the town, that 1.5 hours on those country roads fired my heart’s language. In the early morning, the sunlight fell like a benediction upon the fields—some fallow, some with cotton, some with tobacco, some with sorghum, some with corn that had been harvested. Deer were abundant, as were the turkeys. Tall pine plantations lined the highways at several stretches. At other places, hardwood bottoms held that mystery and beauty that pulls my soul’s strings like few other visions. I don’t miss the gnats, but I do miss the rural sights and sounds and scents and simplicity. Down there, the hustle of Atlanta’s aggressive drivers seems a world away, and the only gunshots one hears are one’s own because you’re an outdoorsman, or because your neighbors harvested venison that afternoon.

I preached the homily at the church, enjoyed fellowship with the saints, spoke to elders and deacons and saints of shared memories of fun times in the region. It was so good to be back–to feel again that pace of country life and country ways with country people. My spiritual cup overflowed.

As I packed up my POV to make the 4-hour drive back to north GA, I had lots of windshield time to think and reminisce. The section from 2 Corinthians 9 came to my mind: “The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully” (2 Cor 9:6). Now that I’m the older guy, I look back on the soil in which I was reared. Little country churches like that played a huge part in shaping my identity, my love of rural things, rural ways. And in this season of Thanksgiving, scores of faces washed across my imagination, of men and women who sowed seeds into my life. And Paul’s words were so viscerally true. Many, many seemingly small people were hugely impactful people. How? By sowing bountifully into a shy, introverted little boy in south GA decades ago, a boy who loved the land, the country ways, and the way the sun’s rays throw golden lances over alfalfa fields.

Encouragement: We never know the impact we might have upon people—sometimes years and years from now. That is, the ripples may not be visible for sometimes great spans of time, but they’ll eventually show. May they be ripples of blessing and gratitude for the seeds precious people sowed in loving ways, but ways that came forth as benediction.