Pulling Weeds

Glimmers
September 8, 2011


“When the crop began to grow and produce grain, the weeds also grew.” Matthew 13:26 NLT

I share the following with a caution: please do not read this and go away thinking that the chaplain is so spiritual that he is constantly thinking about scripture and God and such. And I refuse to be put on a pedestal. Sometimes I think of spiritual things while I am about the routine tasks of being a homeowner and sometimes I just mow. I don’t mind mowing grass. I love planting new annuals and shrubs. I don’t like pulling weeds.

Last week, unable to stand it any longer, I attacked a patch of weeds in the backyard flower bed. As I was on my knees pulling the weeds from the flowers, some of the flowers were pulled up as well. I tried to avoid it, but even so some of the flowers suffered along with the weeds. Now here is where the spiritual part comes in. I suddenly thought about the parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30). “See,” said the Voice inside my head, “That’s what I meant.” “Try as you might to distinguish flowers and weeds, you will sometimes mess up.”

This is a cautionary tale- a parable about miss-judgment (I misspelled it for emphasis). Wheat and tares (weeds) look almost identical, especially in the early growth stages. Attempting to separate them out can lead to costly mistakes. Pulling the weeds sounds like a good idea, but wheat will be destroyed in the effort. When Jesus speaks of wheat and tares, he is really talking about people. It is a story to prove a point.

When we judge a person who comes to our hospital as a drug-seeker, a deadbeat, non-compliant, frequent flyer, neurotic who should be making better choices-we may have every reason to think so today- based on empirical evidence and observation. Our judgment about them today may be dead-on. They may look like a weed today. But who knows what will they be tomorrow, or next week, or next year at the end of the process? They may turn out to be something entirely different from what they appear to be today! What if two years from now, having completed rehab, they have found employment, obtained insurance, cleaned up, got their head on straight and they come back into our hospital for appendicitis, would we treat them differently? Honestly now…maybe we would. And that is the point. We don’t know how things will turn out. We don’t know who is a weed and who is a stalk of wheat by looking at them today. “Let them grow up together.” “Treat them all the same and let me sort out all that stuff at the end of the harvest.”

I know I will still have to fight the urge to draw conclusions and distinctions based on the foul language and self destructive lifestyles of some of the people I will meet in the course of my work. I am human after all. But I got the message…and I will fight the urge and do my best to love everybody the same and let God sort out all the rest at some later date.

Jerald