You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, Sprouts. Today is August 7th, 2018, and this week on the Catholic Spouts, we are talking about the little way.

Yesterday, we talked about how the little way is a path to holiness for the rest of us.

And instead of like climbing a huge, difficult mountain to get to

heaven, it's more like riding an elevator, an elevator that is the arms of Jesus Christ. Now,

another part of the little way has to do with gardening. Have you ever planted a seed and watched it sprout and come up and put out

leaves and grow taller and taller? Well, let's talk about gardening a little bit today. Let's say you

have a little garden and you can plant whatever you want in that little garden. What would you

plant? Would you plant some tomatoes or cucumbers? Or maybe you'd plant some strawberry seeds so you could

have strawberries and strawberry jam later on. Well, what about flowers? Would you plant a flower? Maybe you think it would be silly to

plant a flower. I mean, what good is a flower? All a flower is going to do is bloom and then fade

and then die. And after it's dead, we won't even really know that it was there.

When you plan to flower, you don't really get any use out of it, do you? It's not like you can eat a

flower. And yet, St. Cherez, who gave us the little way, is often called the little flower. And if we want to try to get to

heaven like her, we too are called to be flowers. But why flowers? Why can't we be something more

useful like a vegetable that someone can eat?

Well, the truth is, is that God doesn't call us to be useful. And in fact, he doesn't really care how useful we are.

We think about other people in terms of how useful they are. But God thinks of us only

as his creatures, as his beautiful creatures, and he loves nothing more than to see us bloom and grow

and be exactly as he created us to be. Because that's what a flower does.

A flower grows and blooms and is beautiful just because it is beautiful. If a flower grows in the middle of a forest

and no one walks by ever to see it,

...