The Smallest Seed: Mark 4:30-34

"What shall we say the kingdom of God is like?" Jesus asked, and his eyes sparkled with the delight of a teacher about to spring a surprise. "What parable shall we use to describe it?"

He reached down—perhaps he actually held one between his fingers—and lifted the smallest seed his listeners knew: a mustard seed. A speck. A nothing. You could lose a dozen in the creases of your palm.

"It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade."

They knew mustard. It started as almost nothing and became, in a single growing season, a bush eight or ten feet tall—large enough that birds nested in its branches, finding shelter from the sun. From invisible to impossible. From speck to shelter.