Weeds Among Wheat

A few mornings ago, I woke up early to do some weeding. There are many more things I would rather be doing, and yet there is a certain comfort and satisfaction in watching a patch of overgrown weeds transform into well-groomed soil right before my eyes.

Sometimes it is in these quietest moments when I can hear God most clearly. Which makes sense. How can I hear over the hustle and bustle of my daily life? Over the blaring music, the computer, the phone? No, it is when I consciously choose not to hear from anything else but to remain still and to thoughtfully pray, that God reveals Himself to me.

I love how God speaks. He often uses the very thing I’m doing or the situation I’m in at that moment to highlight an important truth to me. I don’t hear an audible voice. It is more of a deep knowing and something that feels almost like a whisper in my soul. This morning the way He spoke to me was with one simple phrase: “the weeds are easier to pull from your life after it has rained”. Immediately, I understood what God was sharing with me. 

In life, we tend to run from the rain. We shield ourselves from it with umbrellas. We run for shelter to escape it. We pray it away and we curse it when it comes. 

And in all that, we forget the beauty of the rain.

The way that it cools us on a hot summer day. The way it feels on our lips and tastes on our tongue. The way it feels on our skin. And ultimately, how it allows us to pull weeds with ease when it soaks the ground. 

In Matthew 13:24-43, Jesus tells the parable of the wheat and weeds. He explains that the weeds have to be pulled up at just the right time. Pulling them too soon will result in uprooting the wheat along with them. There is a time and a season even for this. Just as God spoke to me about the ease of weeding after the rain, Jesus told his followers that they should wait until the necessary conditions had been met in order to avoid uprooting all that was good. 

In the midst of our current circumstances, it is easy to feel that we should just weed out everything that hurts us, and quickly. It is also easy to see the rain, or in this case negative circumstances, as being something we want to move through as quickly as possible. Yet it is in the rain that the soil becomes fertile. It is in the rain that the wheat can grow. And it is in the rain that the weeds become easier to pull. 

I challenge us today to think about the rain in our own lives. Are we quick to want to get through it, back into the sunlight and onto dry land? Or are we willing to stay in the discomfort a little while longer, knowing that when the time is right, the weeds will be tied in bundles and burned, but the wheat will be gathered into His barn (Matthew 13:30).