Soil

Sometimes we inherit more than we earn. We inherit families that love us, communities that welcome us, and early teachings that shape our sense of right and wrong. And yet, even the best inheritance cannot carry us automatically through the storms we will face later.

I remember sitting on my bed when I was six, my parents kneeling beside me as they walked me through the words of the Salvation Prayer. We cried together, quietly, joy spilling into the corners of that small room. Later, in the baptismal waters, I felt a belonging that seemed permanent, a sense that the world was a moral place and that I had a place in it. Those experiences were real. They were formative. They were full of love.

And yet, as I grew, I learned what Jesus already knew about the good soil in the parable of the sower: it still requires depth. The seed fell on different kinds of ground—some shallow, some choked by thorns, some hardened by the path. But the good soil? It didn’t just receive the seed passively. It had depth enough for roots to grow down, resilience enough to withstand scorching sun, space enough cleared of competing weeds. Good soil does its work beneath the surface, slowly, patiently building what allows life to flourish.

What I had absorbed in the earliest years of my life—care, guidance, affirmation—was necessary, but it was not sufficient to make me whole or awake. Paul understood this tension. In Philippians 2:12-13, he writes, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Both realities exist at once: God’s prior work in us and our ongoing participation in that work. The gift must be received again and again, tended, and sometimes wrestled with.

This is the shape of formation Scripture describes: not a one-time transaction, but a lifetime of being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). The Israelites were delivered from Egypt in a single night, yet they wandered forty years learning what it meant to live as free people under God. Jesus called disciples who walked with him for three years, yet still needed the Spirit to illumine what they had seen and heard. Even Peter, who declared “You are the Christ,” later denied him three times and needed restoration by the lakeside.

Early goodness plants seeds, but Jesus himself warned that not all seeds bear fruit at the same rate or in the same measure—thirty, sixty, a hundredfold (Mark 4:20). The fruit comes only through patient endurance, the stubborn refusal to abandon what is true even when the ground feels hard beneath your feet. Formation is not nostalgia; it is the deliberate act of returning to till the soil, to pull the weeds, to make space for what God has already planted to actually grow.

What in your early life was given to you freely, yet still needs your attention now? Where has the soil grown shallow or choked? Where can you return, not to recapture the past, but to consciously tend what was planted in the good soil of your childhood, so that it might finally bear the fruit it was meant to yield?