Well, I had great plans for today's post, but I ran out of time getting ready for our state's annual denominational gathering this weekend. So, maybe this is a good opportunity not to inflict more of my musings on you and quote someone who really knows what he's talking about. Here's some good food for thought from Quaker spiritual formation writer, Parker Palmer. He's speaking about the passing of the seasons as a metaphor for life.

"If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our area does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, 'How does a baby grow?' But an American child will ask, 'How do you make a baby?' From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere 'raw material' that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it."

(Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. 2000. pp. 96-97.)

Interesting...wonder if it has implications for "making disciples" or "growing disciples." I'll see you around the next bend in the river.