Reading Parable of the Sower, it seems like the writer is a spiritual person looking or finding her own God.  With the start of each new chapter, there are a couple of sentences describing God in one way or another.  At page 24 and 25, it reveals that these excerpts seems to be by the writer trying to describe how they believe God is truly like.  She says that “God is Change”, and then goes on to explain what this excerpt means(page 25).  Based on this, she seems to be trying to find how God might be like that would fit for her setting and situation.  The writer, despite being a daughter of a priest, does not believe, or at least fully believe, that the God she believe in and the God her father believes in are not the same God.  Though, this is most likely because of  the setting and state of life she currently lives in.

The setting in the world seems to take place in a ruined world where a disaster has struck.  Evidence of this ranges from buildings such as houses and churches having walls to protect the people inside from thieves, gangs, or rapist, or just protecting the building itself from being set on fire and destroyed.  The writer even describes her home, 20 miles from Los Angeles, as a place with “maggots”(page 9).  Also, as she, her family, and a few other children and adults go outside their walls protecting their homes to go to church, they “go out in a bunch, and go armed.”(page 8)  The need to do something like this in order to leave their protective walls in the first place tells that the setting of this book is dangerous to the point needing to hold a gun or weapon of some sort just to leave your house.  Even then, it’s not much safer to stay at home as people can come in, rob the residents, vandalise the house, possibly rape anyone inside, and burn the house down.  This happened especially to Mrs. Sims.

Mrs Sims is an old woman who lives by herself and is very religious, given that in the book, she “talked about everyone who wasn’t as holy as she thought she was”(page 21).  This quote shows that she has a “holier than thou” kind a personality that makes her look down on others.  She was also very arrogant and talks about others behind their backs, which is also exemplified by the quote.  Her attitude even drove her son’s family to not live with her due to her and her son’s wife hating each other(page 21-22).  This really says a lot about her unpleasant side of her personality since houses that are not burned down or broken into are rare, which makes her attitude not worth living with her.  Despite this, when tragedy struck her, once where after several people in the church tried to help her, and again when her son’s family died in a house fire set by an unknown arsonist.  These two actions causes Mrs. Sims to commit suicide, which then the writer starts questioning her actions since she points out that Mrs. Sims is very religious and believes that the act of suicide will make that person burn in Hell(page 23).  Despite the trauma Mrs. Sims went through, her actions made the writer question Mrs. Sims faith since the the writer herself is soul searching about God and since Mrs. Sims acted to sure of her faith, starts to wonder if it’s even possible to even follow it after going through to much.