God, the sower, goes out to sow and he scatters his seed generously, almost wastefully, everywhere – on the road, among the rocks, among the thorns, on bad soil, and on rich soil. God is prodigal.ĭictionaries define “prodigal” as “wastefully extravagant and lavishly abundant.” That certainly describes the God that Jesus incarnates and reveals. If nature, scripture, and experience are to be believed, God is the absolute antithesis of everything that is stingy, miserly, frugal, narrowly calculating, or sparing in what it doles out. God, as we see in both nature and in scripture (and know from experience), is over-generous, over-lavish, over-extravagant, over- prodigious, over-rich, and over-patient. Why else do we have 90% more brain cells than we need and why else is nature scattering billions of seeds, of virtually everything, all over the planet every second?Īnd if life is so prodigal, what does this say about God, its author? Nature is like that, teeming with everything, prodigal, fertile, overabundant, wasteful. The title of the book is good metaphor for what she describes, a summer overabundant in fertility. Life seemed to be bursting forth everywhere. From the plants, through the insects, through the animals, to the people, everything seemed to be teeming with fecundity, overactive, overabundant in seed. It tells the story of young woman who got pregnant during a summer within which everything seemed to be dangerously fertile. A couple of years ago, Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book entitled Prodigal Summer.
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