Sermons

By: Amelia McDaniel, Director of Children’s Ministries

I spent eight years living in Louisiana. I’d like to tell you a fell in love with it the minute I set foot there, but that would be a lie. I was eight months pregnant and it was June. I hated it. It was hot and miserable. I longed to be back in the part of the south I understood. The part where roaches weren’t the size of small birds. The part where the cold tap water still came out from the faucet cold instead of tepid to luke warm. The places where I understood how to say the names of streets and towns because there weren’t strings of consonants and vowels that made no sense and involved lots of u’s and x’s.

One hot afternoon I waddled myself over to the local nursery to get some plants for the pots by my door. I chose a collection of things, most of which I had never seen growing in Tennessee or Virginia. They nursery guy looked at me and said, “m’am that’s way too many plants. You won’t need that much.” I, in my wisdom, disagreed with him and I guess he thought better than to argue with the crazy pregnant lady.

I took my plants home and potted them. There was some space between the plants, just the way I had always planted them before back home. They’d fill in as the summer went on. Take that nursery man! I know what I’m doing!

Within two weeks those plants were spilling over the sides. They growing over one another, crowding each other straight out of the pot. He was right. I was in the sub tropics. Abundant growth was all around. Everything there was lush and green and full. Sometimes it was so green it almost hurt my eyes. I did fall in love with Louisiana in time and its crazy mixed up jumble of life.

Enough so that I will happily watch the football game this afternoon with the rest of Who Dat friends cheering on the Saints.

In much the same way I was shocked by the lush growth in Louisiana, we don’t live in a world that focuses much on what there is plenty of. We tend to see what is lacking. I think today’s Gospel speaks to this state we seem to live in.

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