Thanks to everyone who served at our Cream of Wheaton display last weekend. Thanks, too, to 10ofthose, Crossway and Tyndale for keeping us supplied with Bibles and Bible story books that we gave away.

There is an image that stays with me from this last weekend—it’s of carefree kids spotting our display and running/skipping over to the games. Let’s play. Let’s have fun. It happened over and over.

Cream of Wheaton is a city-wide party that runs for four days in and around Memorial Park. Companies have displays at the park, most of them about some kind of life improvement—places like fitness clubs, remodeling contractors, home improvement companies like window/doors/bath specialists and a cancer care group, Peoples Resource Center (our neighbor for the weekend) and College Church.

And there’s John Garvin, a College Church member who has been looking forward to giving away oversized balloons by our display. His balloons draw kids especially over to our area, sometimes with parents and sometimes just on their own.

While the kids wait for their balloons, they play the games Kids' Harbor sent over with us—a giant Connect Four, a Ring Toss, Bozo Bucket style Beanbag Toss. Sometimes kids make multiple visits.

One girl came by. I’m guessing she was in third grade. She was happy with her balloon and then looked at our table. More than candy, she wanted the Ken Taylor Bible stories book. Her eyes lit up. A few minutes later, she came back, this time with her brother. He looked a little older, maybe fifth grade.

“Can I have a Bible, too?” he asked me. We offered him the same book as his sister. He looked at the other ones on our table. “Can I have a whole adult Bible, with the whole thing?”

"Of course," I said. He looked at a few different ones and chose a basic hardback Bible, kind of like our pew Bibles. “I want to read it to my dad every night.”

There was something in the way he said this that broke a little bit of my heart. He wanted to help his dad, so he wanted to read the Bible with him. Every night. I’m praying for this boy and his dad.

But this image took me back many years, not to a son, but to a dad. Not to America, but to Russia. Not to Memorial Park, but to a slightly ramshackle Soviet-built school turned into a makeshift summer camp. Classrooms were turned into sleeping quarters. The small gym was our meeting room and craft room. The kids were starting to arrive.

Vans from different churches were bringing their kids. A man drove up in a small car with his son. Everyone was talking about this first-ever camp. A church camp, unthinkable just a few years before. Growing up Soviet meant that he didn’t think he could believe in God, but he brought his son, maybe he could believe. So, he just drove to us with his son and a friend. “Can you take them for the week?” he pleaded. No one among the camp workers had every met him before. "Of course," our Russian camp believers replied. Cars continued to show up, one by one, “Can you let our boy or girl into your camp?”

The Russian camp staff vacated their classrooms and pitched tents outside to make room for the extra kids, doing everything to make room for as many children as possible.

Decades later, Lorraine in the Wheaton park says, “Everything on our table is free because the best gift ever—the gift of Jesus—is free.”

I think about these seeds in different soils around the world. One dad wants to help his son believe in God. One son wants to read the Bible with his dad every night. I know I’ll probably never know until heaven what happened to these fathers and children,

God’s rich love reaches out in every direction, in ways we might not choose, to people we don’t know—unqualified, undeserving, like us. Times of joy, love, peace, war, richness, poverty—the Word flies through the air from the loving hand of the Sower, landing on soil, settling into hearts, taking root, and even though we may not know how soft the heart or fertile the soil, the Sower knows, cares and loves.

The Father gives us his Son so we can sow the good news in unexpected soils that grow a harvest of righteousness.