Damaged Seeds

Damaged Seeds

Oh God, I could sit here all day reflecting on this. It feels like we live in a world full of damaged seeds. When I look around, I see what was meant to be a vibrant garden—a diverse landscape of unique, beautiful flowers—now resembling a barren wasteland: overrun with weeds, dry soil, and broken roots.

I see communities that should be flourishing, overflowing with potential and promise. Yet, just one block away, there’s poverty, blood on the streets, hungry children, and desperation. God’s vision for the Garden of Eden feels so far from what we’ve become. Our garden has been poisoned—by jealousy, the hunger for power, material obsession, numbing our pain, hatred for differences, disregard for our land, and a world driven by greed. The honor and respect we once held for human life seems to be slipping further and further away.

But let me shift my focus back to the damaged seeds within me.

My father never received the foundation of what love was supposed to look like. My mother, shaped by abandonment and a deep longing for real love, poured all of that yearning into my father. And while he soaked up her love, he struggled to understand it. It was foreign to his soil—something he had never known.

It’s hard to be something you’ve never seen. Maybe that’s part of the reason why our world is filled with so many damaged seeds—people trying to play roles they were never taught or prepared for. That was true of my parents. I loved and adored them both, but now I understand they were simply doing the best they could with what had been poured into them.

My mama was something special to me—extraordinary, loving, brilliant, and selfless. I truly believed the sun rose and set on her. Though she didn’t have a formal education and had to drop out of school at 14 to work, she was the smartest woman I knew. No matter what life threw at us, she always seemed to find a solution. Her love for her family was fierce—like a lioness protecting her cubs.

But I often wondered where that love and instinct came from. She was just nine when her mother died. Her father all but abandoned her. For years, she was passed around from one sibling to another, never truly belonging anywhere. By 14, she decided to make it on her own. But survival proved harder than she imagined. At 17, desperate for escape, she married the first man who returned from the army and asked. That man became my oldest brother’s father—and one of the most abusive men my mother ever encountered.

Another seed that damaged my mother’s soil was her attraction to abusive men. That seed—abuse—became woven into our family’s fabric. Because it was part of her soil, it became part of the plants she raised: me and my siblings.