WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - I am a product of suburbia. I grew up in a small town just outside of Buffalo, New York and spent my teen years in a small town outside of Battle Creek, Michigan. We never had a vegetable garden. From the standpoint of knowing anything about agriculture, I had a deprived childhood.

You can imagine my sense of wonder when, assigned to a church in Manhattan, Kansas I had my first real taste of agronomy.

Manhattan is, again, a small town but not the suburbs. Topeka is approximately 60 miles away and Kansas City is about double that. It is also the home of Kansas State University (KSU), which offers schools of agriculture, animal husbandry and veterinary science.

Several members of my parish were on the "Ag staff" so I was learned some great lessons about plants, animals and the soils around us. For me, it was more than earth science but an opening to new insights about Christ's teaching through the parables. So much of what He taught was based on lessons from the land.

In today's gospel passage - Mark 4:26-34 - our Lord gives us two parables involving seeds. In both cases he compares the Kingdom of God to normal organic growth. Just as God has built certain laws or norms into the way things work on earth, he also has built certain norms into the spiritual world as well.

As I started pondering this, I was taken back more than 40 years when I was first introduced to a protestant collegiate ministry called Campus Crusade, led by Dr. Bill Bright. His passion was to take the teachings and principles of Christ and put them in forms that were transferable - where the students he taught could pass them along to others.

Probably his most famous tract was called the "Four Spiritual Laws." Without debating the doctrinal merits of each of these laws, I was simply taken back to the basic concept he used in the introduction.

He starts, "Just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so are there spiritual laws that govern your relationship with God."

This is exactly what Jesus was saying in these parables. There is an order to things both in the physical world and spiritual world. God has organized them both. When we recognize that the spiritual area of life operates according to a specific set of principles we are able to cooperate with God to experience greater growth.

Through this we are also reminded that spiritual growth cannot be attained by approaching it through worldly means alone. Maturity in the things of God is more than the accumulation of religious facts and information. It comes as a transformation of our inner being.

Lesson One: Growth Takes Patience

We live in a world of oriented toward instant gratification. We want things to come fast as well as easy. For example, it would seem to be so much easier to simply take a weight loss pill than work on diet and exercise. We want to see those pounds just drop off as it by magic.

Today we see all kinds of promises of quick performance to speed up our reading, learn a musical instrument, or get a college degree. We also try to apply this same perspective to spiritual growth.

Our Lord reminds us in the Parable of the Seeds that we need to give ourselves time to grow in God.

When I lived in Kansas, KSU had a number of experimental crops growing in and around the Manhattan area. After the seeds were planted, nothing could be seen for a long time. All the while beneath the soil miracles were taking place. Seeds were germinating, sending out roots and beginning to sprout upward.

Even after the plant grows above ground, much of the growth is imperceptible. Size could not really measured moment by moment or, in some cases, even day by day. Yet, over a period of time, momentous things had taken place. The plants had grown large and strong. This is the organic method of growth.

Such it is for our spiritual life. Often our growth in Christ cannot be measured by the hour, the day, the week or even the month. Yet, over time we can look back and see how we have, in fact, grown. God's graces and virtues are more evident in our lives and we are spending more time in prayer and Scripture.

Growth also cannot take place without remaining in the correct environment long-term. You can't be a come-and-go Catholic or bolt early because nothing seems to be taking place. You have to remain in the growth environment  - you have to learn live there.

After coming into full communion in the Catholic Church several years ago, obviously, I had to surrender my faculties as a bishop in my former Anglican denomination. In order to provide an income for my family, I began working as a freelance writer.

This required networking in a completely different world from my previous decades of Christian ministry. One of the things I did was join a chapter of Business Networking International ...