Jeff Parrott
speaker
1,461 appearances
12 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard yesterday
Jeff Parrott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 4.
Appearances
The originally peaceful landscape was just smashed to pieces.
Now, given the tragic loss of human life in the fields of World War One, it's kind of hard to imagine any physical spaces that have been more broken and more barren.
amidst this broken and barren landscape, it seemed like beauty was buried for good.
How could beauty possibly exist in a place like that?
But in reality, something beautiful actually was breaking through the ground for all to see.
There's this particular flower, the poppy, that can lie dormant in the ground for decades, even up to a hundred years.
Now here's the thing poppy seeds only grow when disrupted from dormancy and showered with light, the light that begins the process of germination.
These seeds need to be disturbed in order to grow.
Now during that chaotic destruction of World War One, portions of the broken and the barren landscape of Europe were actually being cultivated.
The digging and the shelling woke up the dormant poppy seeds, exposing them to the light that would display life and beauty.
And so in the midst of the brokenness and the barrenness of these fields, the presence of beauty did erupt, as a canvas of red poppies blanketed the landscape.
It's this amazing picture of life persisting in even the most lifeless places.
When one soldier, John McCrae, observed the beauty of these poppies blanketing the battlefields and the graves of World War One, it inspired his famous poem in Flanders Fields.
And as generations have gone by, many still remember the sacrifice of those who fought in World War I and other wars by wearing poppies on Remembrance Day.
Now that contrast between the poppies and the pervasive destruction is powerful.
and it communicates something that digs into the heart of every one of us.
No matter how great the brokenness or the barrenness, beauty has a way of breaking through.
Life really can flourish in even the most lifeless places.
And if that's true, then it completely changes the way we see things that are broken and barren.
Our passage today in the first ten verses of John chapter twenty gives us a far more powerful depiction of how life and beauty can break through the brokenness and barrenness.
Showing 521–540 of 1,461 · page 27 of 74
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