The Endless Supply

2 Corinthians 9:10Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

If you walked down Main Street in East Nashville back in the 1960s, you couldn’t miss the towering brick factories of the General Shoe Company—later known as Genesco.

The multi-story red brick buildings framed the street, humming with the rhythmic clatter of assembly lines and the scent of tanned leather and machine oil.

From the street, those industrial brick walls looked permanent, solid, and secure.

At the helm of that empire was W. Maxey Jarman. Under his leadership, Genesco grew into a retail colossus, becoming the first apparel company to top one billion dollars in annual sales.

Jarman was also a devoted believer who quietly poured millions of his personal earnings into Christian missions and charitable work.

Years later, corporate overexpansion, heavy debt, and boardroom strife unraveled his holdings. Genesco’s stock crashed, and Jarman’s fortune largely vanished.

Sometime afterward, a close friend asked Maxey Jarman if he regretted giving away so much money, knowing how much he had lost in the end.

Jarman paused and replied quietly: “I never lost a dime of what I gave away; I only lost what I kept.”

Jarman’s statement echoes Paul’s words to the Corinthians some 2,000 years before.

Paul reminds us that God provides two distinct things: bread for food and seed to the sower. Bread is meant to sustain our daily lives; seed is entrusted to us to be scattered.

Our natural instinct is to hoard our seed, believing that holding tight protects our future. But anything kept in human hands—whether grain or stock portfolios—remains vulnerable to economic disasters. The only resources we are sure never to lose are those released into the soil of other people's lives.