Not Everything That Grows is Good

Over the past two Sundays, I’ve been struck by the theme in the Gospel readings: Everyone wants the harvest.

We celebrate the full wheat field, the overflowing fruit basket, the answered prayer, the healed marriage, the saintly life. We love the harvest. But almost no one talks about what had to happen before the harvest.

Before a seed ever grows, hard ground has to be broken open. Rocks have to be removed. Weeds have to be pulled. Soil has to be turned over, often in ways that look destructive before they look fruitful.

The Gospel reminded us last week that the problem is never the seed. The seed is the Word of God. The Sower is always generous. The question is always the condition of the soil. I’ve caught myself asking the wrong question more times than I’d like to admit.

“Why is God doing this?”

As if every hardship were divine punishment. Jesus dismantled that way of thinking when His disciples asked (John 9) about the man born blind: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” His answer was essentially neither. Their assumption belonged to a worldview that equated suffering with personal guilt. Christ revealed something deeper.

The Father’s discipline is never vengeance. Every correction He allows is ordered toward our conversion. Toward healing. Toward making us capable of receiving more of Him.

Maybe the better question is:

What is He preparing me for?

Then this Sunday’s Gospel carried the image one step further.

Wheat and weeds look remarkably alike when they’re young. It takes time before their true nature becomes visible. That’s true of people, too.

Not everyone who grows is growing toward life.

Some lives, like weeds, simply reproduce themselves in ways that choke out everything around them. Those weeds are producing fruit, but what kind and at what cost? Weeds will proliferate in soil that hasn’t been touched! Look at overgrown, vacant lots and abandoned yards. This week I grabbed a pot from the side of the house that hasn't been touched in 4 years. It was full of growth - an invasive plant species.

Other lives, like wheat, quietly become nourishment for countless souls.

That image has lingered with me today. The fruit of our lives isn’t simply meant to be a replication of ourselves. It is meant to sustain life in someone else.

That reframes the way we should think about success.

The evidence of faith isn’t perfect circumstances or impressive accomplishments. It’s becoming the kind of person whose presence leaves people better nourished than when they arrived.

I’ve realized that every season of cultivation in my own life (the painful pruning, the waiting, the surrender, the losses I never would have chosen) has slowly loosened my grip on control. Maybe that is the fruit.

Not that I have everything together or have all the answers. But that I trust the Gardener much more than I used to. I don’t have to know the plan. I just have to be willing to be watered and pruned and fed under the warmth of His rays.

Cultivation isn’t something that happens once before the seed is planted. It continues in every step of the growing process. The Lord keeps turning over the soil of our hearts, removing what cannot remain, strengthening what can bear fruit, patiently tending us until our lives begin to feed someone besides ourselves.

That’s what holiness looks like.

Allowing ourselves to be so well cultivated that our lives become nourishment instead of noise.

Not becoming extraordinary in big and flashy ways, but quietly becoming the kind of person whose life makes it easier for someone else to grow.