Our Cathedral kids and counselors will soon be enjoying an amazing week at Camp Bratton Green, the camp for the Diocese of Mississippi in Canton. While there, they will sing a grace before meals that is often called “The Johnny Appleseed Grace” made popular by a Walt Disney film. It goes like this:
In fact, those are the words of the first stanza of a hymn from the Swedenborgian Church (The New Church) of which John Chapman, also known as Johnny Appleseed, was a missionary.
Johnny Appleseed was not just a Disney Character, he was a real person. I have visited his grave in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The inscription on his headstone reads, “He lived for others.” This humble nurseryman went around sowing seeds, planting nurseries and orchards, and preaching. He sowed a lot of seed in his lifetime. His life had meaning and hope because he relied on the principle that “Anybody can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in a seed.”
A lot of seeds will be planted in the souls of the campers at Camp Bratton Green this summer. I suspect some seeds will also be planted in the souls of their counselors. This video for the upcoming Campaign for Camp Bratton Green and Gray Center tells about how such seeds have been planted in the souls of thousands through the years and expresses the hope that there will be thousands more in the future. The campaign is appropriately called “The Seeds You Sow.”
Through our support of the campaign we will help sow seeds in the souls of children, youth, and adults. Let us contribute and let us pray for the souls past, present, and future campers, counselors, and visitors to Camp Bratton Green and Gray Center, where the seeds of faith, hope, and love take root and grow. Those seeds grow in souls and bear world-changing fruit.
I’ll see you in Church!
The Very Reverend Ronald D. Pogue
Interim Dean
St. Andrew’s Cathedral
Jackson, Mississippi