My wife and I went shopping the other day for seeds because we are getting ready to plant our garden.  We don’t plant a big garden, but we like to try to grow a few things.  Last year our garden was not a huge success.  We planted corn, beans, carrots and cucumbers.  Only the cucumbers really turned out.  So this year we are trying some new things.  We are going to plant cucumbers again due to our success last year and beans.  We are also planting spinach and pumpkins.  That will be fun.  I have dreams of producing some huge pumpkins worthy of the county fair, but I am guessing they will barely be big enough to carve for Halloween.  But there is one more thing we are planting.  As we were looking through the seeds I came across sunflowers.  Not just any ordinary sunflowers but mammoth sunflowers.  Wow!  You put the word "mammoth" in front of anything a man wants to buy and you had better watch out.  I turned to my wife with a big grin on my face holding the sunflower seeds.  She just rolled her eyes at me (I can’t imagine why).  "You want to plant sunflowers? Why?"  I responded, "Because sunflowers are neat and different.  Please."  She said, "What ever."  Now we have sunflowers (I mean, MAMMOTH sunflowers).

But here is the real story behind sunflowers and me.  As a child a remember fields and fields of sunflowers, as far as the eye could see, near my grandparents farm.  Maybe there weren’t that many, but it sure seemed that way.  I thought they were the most beautiful thing; many because we did not have them around Dawson.  Then one day I noticed something.  As I was riding past my favorite sunflower field with my grandparents I noticed that they were facing a different direction.  Being the curious kid I was I asked grandpa about it.  He told me that sunflowers don’t only look like the sun, but they follow the sun as well, hence the name, sunflower.  Where ever the sun is in the sky, the sunflower will follow it.  That I thought was pretty cool. 

Wow! Even simple little sunflowers know how to follow the sun. Seriously, do I really need to write anymore?  Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6)  I guess we can learn a lot from sunflowers…just follow the Son. Amen!