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Professionally, I’m a retired professor of accounting and former chair of the School of Accounting at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. My academic work explored how people make decisions in complex systems, especially when information is imperfect or overwhelming. I’ve published in a fair number of journals that few people read voluntarily, and I spent decades thinking about how technology shapes human behavior. These days, my time is divided between managing a small flock of chickens, herding goats, chatting on amateur radio (KO4LMP), and living just on the edge of the grid—literally and metaphorically. I’m a father to five daughters, a grandfather to 17, and a great-grandfather to three. Somewhere along the way, I realized that what I enjoy most is simply talking about the world we live in—and how to make sense of it.

🐣 Chicken Seeds

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You said:

Please reflect on this entry from my journal. One primary school teacher told me of trying to teach the children that faith was like a seed. She showed the children some seeds in her hand and asked, “What kind of seeds are these?” The children were anxious to answer. Some thought they were flower seeds and others thought they might be some kind of vegetable. Finally, one small child piped up, “I know what they are, they’re chicken seeds!”

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderful journal entry — gentle, humorous, and quietly profound.

At first glance, it’s simply a funny misunderstanding, the sort of innocent logic children are famous for. But at a deeper level, it beautifully captures the essence of faith itself: how we see and interpret unseen potential through the lens of what we already know.

The child’s answer, “chicken seeds,” reveals a sincere, literal faith — a belief that every living thing must come from something small and hidden, like a seed. In a way, the child wasn’t wrong; eggs are a kind of seed of life. The remark blends ignorance and insight in equal measure.

For adults, it can be a gentle reminder that faith often grows in the soil of misunderstanding, and that our task as teachers, mentors, or believers is not to laugh at the naïveté, but to nurture the instinct to believe that small things contain life. Faith begins with the imagination to believe something invisible can grow.

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