The Mustard Seed   

(Finland – Week  29)

28 JUL 2015

Hyvää iltäpäivää! 

This week we have been finding the famous Finnish wild berries! Berries grow everywhere here and you can just go into the forest and harvest whenever you like. We don't spend much time running through the forest, but we walk down a lot of streets and the berries grow on the side of the road too! We were walking a family to church and lost the children for a minute, turns out they were stopping for a mid-afternoon snack of blueberries! My companion and I have feasted on the delicious roadside berries ourselves. We have found blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries! The strawberries are so tiny and sweet they taste like candy. I feel like a true Finn now.

I was recently studying the mustard seed. We read in Matthew 17:20, "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." I've read that a lot and thought, wow, my faith isn't even as big as a mustard seed. Recently I've been thinking about this a little differently. A mustard seed is tiny, not much weight, not much to look at, really nothing at all. When a mustard tree grows to completion, the seed has become over 10 feet tall, birds lodge in the branches, and it is the biggest of the herbs. The seed really doesn't have value, except in it's potential. All of us have times when we have tiny faith, tiny as a mustard seed, and we feel that our faith has no weight. The wonderful thing is that we are not limited to perpetual tiny-ness. We grow, we find our divine potential, and we can become a great mustard tree. We don't need to be the tree now, we just need to trust that one day we will be. Trusting in the Lord that we can and will become something better, takes a lot of faith, a miraculous amount, and that is when we move the mountains. I love finding hope in the scriptures, if there is something that seems to bring you down in the scriptures, look at it again and find the hope.

Lots of Love!

Sisar Mendenhall