"Man without God is a seed upon the wind." What a picture! A tiny, living thing awaiting its moment of fulfillment, caught up in the movement of tremendous energy, is at the mercy of forces that are not responsive to its own ends! There is a grand unconscious vitality unfolding with mounting energy its impersonal purpose. In the grip of something like this, what is a tiny seed - no more than a particle of dust, a nameless nothing. Here is the abandonment of all purpose, stark helplessness without mooring or anchor. The fact that there is locked within the seed a private world of pattern and design makes no difference to the fierce velocities that sweep it on the reckless, relentless way.

"Man without God is a seed upon the wind." He is a victim of the currents of life that carry him where they will with a bland unmindfulness of purposes and ends which belong to him as a living, thinking, feeling creature. It means that such a man has no sense of center. He takes his clue to all meaning and values from the passing moment, the transitory event, the immediate issue of his day. He is at home nowhere because he is not at home "somewhere." The Master speaks of this in his direct question: "What would a man give in exchange for his soul?"

But there is a sense in which a man with God is a seed upon the wind - the man who has made the primary surrender, the commitment, the yielding to God at the core of his being. He is one who has relaxed his will to exercise and hold firm the initiative over his own life. This does not come without exacting struggle of the soul. One by one the outposts of his spirit are captured, retaken and lost again through hours, months, even years of warfare, until at last the very citadel of his spirit is under siege and he is subjected to an utter yielding. There follows often the long silence when nothing stirs. Then out of the quiet of his vanquished spirit something stirs and a new life emerges that belongs more to God than to self. The movement now rests with Purposes that are beyond the little purposes, with Ends that transcend the private ends, the Purposes and Ends of God. There is a sense in which a man with God is a seed upon the wind."