People who grade themselves against an internal accountability that they’d never apply to someone they love often don’t realize how much they’re carrying: the running tab of every way they fell short today, every version of the gap between who they are and who they thought they’d be by now. 

You may know it in yourself, or you may be watching someone you love carry it in silence.

Jesus tells a parable about a field where weeds grow up alongside the wheat, and when the workers want to pull the weeds immediately, clean everything up and get it right, the farmer says to let them grow together, because the sorting belongs to the harvest.

The more I’ve sat with this parable, the more I think Jesus is describing something closer to home than the world out there. 

The field is you, or it might be a person you worry about.

My biggest takeaway is something that gets skipped: this farmer’s posture. He already knows what’s growing and that it’s not ideal in that it’s a mix of both weeds and wheat, and he tends the field as it is.

The farmer can afford to wait because he knows what we tend to forget: something is already working in there. Then Jesus adds one more image, yeast already working through the dough long before anything shows on the surface.

Hm. 

This week, whether you’re carrying this yourself or watching someone you love carry it, put down the accounting for a little while and trust that the farmer is already tending the field.

God Bless. 

FF