Focus on strengthening the good

The garden is starting to come alive again after the rain. There is even new grass sprouting where once were barren earth. Beautiful, especially from a little bit further away. Look up close and you notice the weeds also sprouted. I tried pulling the weeds out but out came the tiny grass sprouts too.  It reminded me of the parable where Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven with a similar scenario. The enemy sowed his weed-seed at night amongst the freshly sown wheat. The instruction from the sower to his slaves might sound counter-intuitive.

“No”, he said, “when you gather up the weeds, you might also uproot the wheat with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest.” – Matthew 13:29

Instead, sorting out this problem was left for the harvest season when the reapers would first collect the weeds to be burned and then gather the harvest of wheat into the barn.

So much like my dad’s advice when I complained about the weeds in the grass.

Don’t bother with the weeds and weedkiller. Just keep cutting the grass short regularly. That will prevent the weeds from growing tall enough to produce seed. Over time the grass will become stronger and thicker and the weed-problem would be overcome.

Farmer’s advice. It does make sense.

When there are areas of new growth in our lives, there also are things that come to invade. Weeds. Alien vegetation.

I really just love the descriptive nature of the Afrikaans words in this case.

Weeds = ‘on-kruid’, that is a ‘not-herb’ when you translate the syllables separately back to English.

Alien vegetation = ‘indringer spesie’, that is an imposter plant species.

We can focus on those negative things and it will start to consume our time and energy. Or we can focus on the positive seeds that have sprouted and use our time and energy to strengthen those. Allow the sun to shine on those, water those and as it grows it will automatically leave less place for the imposters driving most of them out. That will leave only a limited number of imposters which we would have to gather up and burn. Those would be easily identifiable and by then the roots of the good seed would have grown strong enough to not be uprooted as well.

Unfortunately, we are also quick to notice the weeds in others’ lives and want to help them get rid of it. But Jesus called those a speck in their eye. Again, a very delicate area and the chances of causing hurt far outmeasure the chance of doing good.

Let us leave the little weeds in our own and others’ lives for the harvesters to deal with. Let us rather focus on strengthening the good seed that we might have a harvest 30-fold, 60-fold and 100-fold.