Unsealed: Mustard Seed

What Faith Looks Like Before It Works

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed.

There was a farmer who walked his land in the cool of morning, surveying what he had planted. His neighbors had sown their fields with wheat and barley. Crops of substance, crops that everyone could see from the road, crops that promised a respectable harvest and a predictable return.

But this farmer held in his palm something different.

A mustard seed.

The smallest seed known to those who worked the soil. So small you could lose it in the creases of your hand. So insignificant that if you dropped it in the dirt, you might never find it again.

His neighbors saw him standing there, rolling this speck between his fingers, and they shook their heads. What kind of fool plants mustard when he could plant grain? What kind of man wastes good soil on something so small, so common, so utterly without promise?

But the farmer was not interested in their calculations.

He was not planting for their approval. He had seen something they had not. Had understood something about the nature of growth that could not be measured in the first season.

He made a small depression in the earth with his thumb. Dark, damp soil that had been turned and prepared. He placed the seed in that tiny hollow, covered it with a breath of dirt, and walked away.

He did not hover. He did not dig it up each morning to check for progress. He did not stand guard over it or build a fence around it or mark it with a stone.

He simply trusted the hidden work. The mysterious collaboration between seed and soil and rain and sun that no man fully understands but every farmer must depend upon.

And the seed lay there in the darkness. Silent. Invisible. Doing the slow, secret work that all life does before it can be seen.

Days passed. The farmer went about his other work. Mending fences, tending sheep, watching the sky for rain. His neighbors’ fields began to show the first green blades of wheat breaking through the crust of earth. Neat rows. Visible progress. Evidence that something was happening.

But where the farmer had planted his mustard seed, there was nothing.

Just bare dirt.

The neighbors walked past and smiled to themselves. They had been right. The fool had wasted his time.

The farmer walked that patch of ground each evening, and some nights his hand would move toward the soil, fingers ready to dig, to check, to verify that something—anything—was happening beneath the surface.

The temptation whispered.

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe nothing’s there.

Maybe you should have planted wheat.

But each time, he pulled his hand back. Stopped himself. Because he knew that faith means trusting what you cannot see. That growth means leaving the seed alone to do what seeds do. That the only way to kill what’s germinating is to keep digging it up to prove it’s alive.

So he waited.

Beneath the surface, beneath the sight of those who measured only what their eyes could see, the seed had split. It had drunk in the moisture of the soil. It had sent down a root. Thin as a hair, pale as bone. Reaching deeper for water, for anchor, for the hidden nutrients that would sustain what was coming.

And then, when the time was right, it broke through.

Not gently. Not quietly.

It forced its way through the packed earth with the violence of something that refuses to stay buried. The stem split the crust like a fist punching through a wall. Then leaves. Small at first, easy to overlook. But growing. Not with the uniform predictability of wheat, but with something wilder. Something that could not be contained in tidy rows.

The farmer watched it emerge and felt the quiet satisfaction of a man who knows he has planted something true. His neighbors saw it now too, but they were unimpressed. “It’s just mustard,” they said. “A weed, really. Nothing compared to our wheat.”

But the farmer kept tending his land. And the mustard kept growing.

It did not grow like wheat, which rises to a respectable height and then stops, having reached its modest ceiling. It grew like something that had forgotten there was supposed to be a limit. It thickened. It branched. It pushed upward and outward with a relentless, generous energy.

By the end of the season, while the neighbors’ wheat stood in orderly, waist-high rows, the mustard plant had become something else entirely. Not a plant. A tree. Its trunk was thick enough that you could lean against it. Its branches spread so wide that they cast shade across the farmer’s entire garden. Its leaves were so dense that when the wind moved through them, they sounded like water.

And then the birds came.

They came from the hills and the valleys, from the shores of the distant sea.

Sparrows and finches, doves and swallows. They came because here, in the middle of this farmer’s field, was something they had not found in the neighbors’ orderly wheat.

A place to rest. A place to nest. A place to raise their young in safety, hidden among the branches, sheltered from the heat and the hawks.

The wheat fields offered only exposure. Straight lines where predators could see everything, where there was no cover, no refuge, just relentless production. But the mustard tree offered sanctuary. Chaos that felt like home. Wilderness that welcomed the wild.

The tree that had begun as the smallest of seeds had become an ecosystem.

The neighbors stood at the edge of the farmer’s land, staring. Their wheat had been harvested, threshed, and stored—a respectable yield, exactly what they had planned for. But it was gone now. Consumed. Finished.

The mustard tree remained. Still growing. Still providing. Still offering shelter to every bird that came seeking rest.

“How did this happen?” they asked the farmer.

He looked at the tree, its branches swaying gently in the evening breeze, birds singing from within its leaves, and he smiled.

“I planted a seed,” he said.

“And then I trusted the growth.”

The seed is in your hand.

What are you afraid to plant because you can’t yet see the tree?

<3EKO

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