Wheat and Weeds

Do you see the pattern yet? Want to do one more? Okay, here we go. 

Jesus tells a parable about the wheat and the weeds, and it goes something like this: a farmer was planting in his field, planting the wheat in the meticulous kind of manner that a farmer should plant. But then, darkness fell and an enemy snuck into the field and started sowing weed seeds among the wheat. Of course, the enemy doesn't take as great of care sowing his seed as the farmer does, so it doesn't take long before the farmer realizes there are weeds everywhere. 

The farmer's workers want to set about the painstaking task of removing the weeds from the wheat, but the farmer tells them not to. If you do, he says, you might disturb the wheat that's growing. So let them all grow together, and we'll separate it all out later. 

So they let the weeds grow. 

As you might expect, here's the point: I am both the wheat and the weeds. 

We want to read this parable and believe that we are the wheat. We are the faithful ones, growing where the Farmer planted us. We pray, read the Bible, go to church, tithe, wear our WWJD bracelet, have the bumper sticker on our car, have the Christian radio station on pre-set. If this world is wheat and weeds, we are clearly the wheat - we are nutritious and functional and serve a purpose, all while creating a harvest for the Lord. 

And there's some truth to that. The Farmer did take meticulous care when He planted you. He chose exactly the kind of seed that He wanted you to be and put you where He wanted you to grow and you are nutritious and functional and purposeful where He has you.

And sometimes, yes, it can feel like you're surrounded by weeds.

But there's more than that. 

Because the enemy has also snuck into the place where you are, and you're growing things in your life that you were never meant to grow. You are angry and jealous and insecure and uncertain and timid and sinful, to one degree or another. And you are, in the space of someone else's wheat, a weed. 

That's why we have to be careful about trying to become the workers, the helping hands. They wanted to uproot the weeds, but if we're being honest, we're just as much weed as anyone else. 

Yet the Farmer lets us grow up together anyway. He lets us share the same space - our wheat with their weeds and their wheat with our weed. We're all growing in the same soil, looking for roots, reaching for the Son, becoming some weird kind of hybrid of what the field was intended to be - our good, purposeful, functional, created self blending into a sea of less-than, of weeds. 

And we all know, because we've lived it, that just pulling the weeds in our lives doesn't make us better wheat. So we've come to the same conclusion that God has - let it all grow together. Some drawing more nutrients than others; some having firmer roots than others; the good right among the less-than, the Farmer's plan still somehow taking root in the enemy's spoil. 

And one day, when that day comes, the Farmer will sort it all out. It'll be okay. There will be enough wheat, and we will be among it...and we'll throw all the weeds into the fires and burn them up forever, left with nothing but the pureness of what the Farmer planted in the first place.