Behold, a sower went out to sow rice in his mountain farm.

For two long, hungry months he prepared. Sweat dripped from his body as he slashed the mountainside clear of undergrowth, cutting down all the smaller trees and limbing the ones too big to cut down. Nothing must shade the precious plants soon to grow here. After giving the brush piles a few weeks to dry out, he burned them. After the fire, he hauled off the remaining charred logs and weeded the field by hand.

Finally, it is time to seed the ground. The whole village turns out for the event. “All right,” the farmer hollers, “you men line up at the bottom of the hill. You ladies get the seed ready. The chicken is cooking, and we will eat when the work is done. Ready, set, go!”

Whooping and hollering, determined to keep ahead of the women, the men madly start poking holes in the ground about three inches apart using long, pointed poles. The ladies, bent on showing that they can work just as fast as the men, race to fill each hole with a few grains of rice from short sections of bamboo, tamping dirt over them with the butt of the seed container.

None of this farmer’s seed falls by the wayside or on the rocky soil. It is far too precious to scatter carelessly. But there are other threats. Even as the villagers plant the seeds, tiny red ants began to haul them away to their nests. Seeing this, the farmer takes off into the jungle. Half an hour later he reappears, carrying part of a termite mound. He crumbles and scatters it around the area where the ants are scavenging. Finding the termites and larvae even tastier than the rice, the ants soon forget about the seed.

Disaster is averted before too much is lost.

But that isn’t the end of the fight. The day after the planting, the first hurricane of the season blows in. Torrential rains swell the river until it’s too deep to cross, so the farmer has to wait and worry for a week until the rains abate and he can check on his field. He finds that runoff has cut two swaths across it, carrying away the seeds in its path. There is nothing to be done but to continue caring for what remains.

One day, the farmer’s son comes running home. “Father!” he shouts, “someone has vandalized our field and dug up all the seeds around the edges! Who would have done this to us?”

“An enemy has done this,” the farmer answers. “My enemy the rat. And I don’t even have the fifty cents it costs to buy rat poison down in the lowlands. We will just have to cut the jungle back a little farther and hope the rat is satisfied with the rice on the edge.”

A few days later, the farmer comes down with malaria, giardiasis and pneumonia, all at the same time. He lies on his sleeping mat for a week, unable to work. By the time he recovers enough to hike to his field, the weeds have grown so thick in some areas that the newly sprouted rice has been choked to death. The farmer knows that pulling out the weeds will uproot some of the rice. But if he doesn’t keep the jungle at bay, it will reclaim the entire field, and the crop will be a complete loss. The weeds must come out, despite the toll on the rice.

Half way through the weeklong weeding job, the farmer arrives one morning to find a pig rooting its way across the field. Screaming indignantly and flailing his arms, he chased the beast off his farm, heaving rocks after it as a warning not to come back.
In time, the harvest finally arrives. The rice plants that survived the ants, the hurricane, the rat, the weeds and the pig have grown tall and strong, their heads heavy with increase. The harvest will sustain the farmer and his family and keep starvation from their doorstep, so it has been worth all the hours, sweat and heartbreak.

Here on Mindoro, the parable of the sower is acted out daily in our lives. Growing upland rice in the Philippines is a bit different than growing barley in Palestine, but both teach us the process of growing disciples. As Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matt. 13:9).

• Twitter