The Seed Must Die

The Seed Must Die
John 12.20-26

Every autumn, when I was a boy, we used to collect horse chestnuts. We would watch the trees as the chestnuts started to fall, usually in late September or early October. The prickly, green outer shell would often split; if it didn’t, we would slice it open. There, inside, would be a dark brown chestnut, sometimes over an inch in diameter, chunky and shiny. We called them ‘conkers’.

They were beautiful objects, smooth to hold and good to look at. You could line up a row of them on a shelf. But that wasn’t, of course, what we usually did. We would pierce a hole in the middle of the conker, thread it on a piece of knotted string, and then battle would begin. In a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’, we would test our conkers against each other, swinging them on the string and crashing them into each other until one smashed to pieces. Nothing so subtle as scoring points: it was death or glory, each time. The winner survived to fight another battle...

Taken from John for Everyone Part 2 – by Tom Wright