One Lousy Month

I'm watching this vine crawl up the railing on the porch. It climbed the bush in front. Then stretched over to the railing. It's curling around the front. I'm reminded of Jesus' story about wheat and tares.

I looked up tares once. I believe it said that they are a crop grown for livestock feed. Kind of like a vine. Tares have a weak stalk. They will intertwine with another plant and use it for support. Tares don't kill the other plant. But they will stunt it. 

In the story, a landowner has his hired hands plant wheat. The guy's neighbor comes with a gang of miscreants and throws out tare seeds in the same field. Tares aren't weeds. They had real use as fodder. It just wasn't what this guy wanted in that field.

Farmers are pretty picky about what they plant where. You rotate crops to keep the soil from depleting. Those tares messed up this guys rotation and made a lot of extra work for harvesting. Instead of grabbing huge handfuls, knowing it was all wheat. He would now need to individually sift each every plant. Very time consuming, I imagine.

So a few weeks pass. As the plants start to grow, the hired hands notice that some of them don't look like wheat. A little more time passes, and these guys are definitely sure some of that stuff isn't wheat. So the foreman goes to the landowner. 

"Didn't we plant wheat in the south field?" he asks. "Yes," says the owner. The foreman continues, "Well, there are tares mixed in with the wheat. Someone sabotaged us. What do we do?"

The owner looks over the field. He can see the tares and the wheat. The men sigh, realizing that they're going to be pulling tares out of the ground for the next few days. "Want us to pull them up?" asks the foreman.

"No", says the owner. "If you pull up the tares, you'll also damage some of the wheat. I'm not willing to lose any of the wheat. Not one grain. Wait until they both finish growing. When we harvest, we'll pull them apart. The wheat goes to the sellers. The tares you can burn for a bonfire."

"The tares make good feed for the livestock," says the foreman. The owner looks at him and says, "Yes, but it's not what I wanted. And I'm ticked off. Burn it. Burn it all."

Jesus finishes the story saying, "This is what it will be like at the end of the age." 

The point?

After a month like this, I start to question where God is. How can evil always seem to win out? Bad things happen, and there is no choice but to accept it. The voice inside says that there is no hope. There is no salvation. It is this way, just live with it. 

I feel naive, Pollyanna if you will, But I can't. I can't accept that. I may endure it. I may have to go through it. But I cannot believe that this how it's supposed to be.

Why is there evil? Because someone planted something He never intended. God looked over the world, time, and space. He saw what the landowner saw. If He pulls up the tares now, He'll lose some of the wheat too. It's just too intertwined.

Evil is ingrained in us. It's in our histories, our upbringing, our past, our future - like tares climbing wheat stalks. It wraps around and uses the good to spread, grow, and even flourish. 

But God decided that He isn't willing to lose any of the wheat. He isn't willing to accept any losses. Every last grain, every last person that He planted, will be His. No one will be lost. Not one. And He will wait. He will wait until He knows that He can gather them, pull them apart, and burn the rest of it.

That doesn't make the evil any easier to endure. Well, not for me anyway. It doesn't take away the hurt. And it doesn't bring back what was lost. But I still believe. It's all I have left. 

Promises, promises

I wish I had answers for you - how to forgive, what to do with the anger. I understand how it feels. Maybe that’s why we get along so well. For all our differences, we are a lot alike.

What I do know, what I cling to with nothing but faith, is that God gives peace. One day, when the world has spent itself, when He has found every person He calls His own, He will finish what He started. We live right now with only a promise. The promise that through Christ’s death we are righteous. No shame, no judgement, no more little voice that says “if only”. He will open our eyes. We will see ourselves - and those around us - as He sees us. Washed clean and set apart, on display as the crowning jewels of His achievement. Like a painting that holds a special place in your heart. We hold that place in His.

I was reading a passage in Galatians over lunch. The author tells them “you were set free by Jesus. Don’t put the chains back on.” We no longer live by the law, the expectations that other people impose on us. God offers grace. And His only term is that we love Him. All God asked, all Jesus preached, was believe. And it doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or have done. Because He makes us new. He makes us as we were always intended to be - in His image. Full of peace, love, and joy.

The Bible describes it as fruit of the Spirit. Fruit grows. Fruit is the natural by product of the tree. The tree’s entire existence hinges on the fruit. The tree doesn’t create the fruit. It doesn’t make the fruit grow. The fruit just does because, well, that’s what it is. Peace, joy, love, those all come because, well, that’s who He is. It can’t be any other way. And as we become like Him, then we become that tree too. We grow that fruit too.

The world is still broken. And in this life, we will never fully realize this hope. The passage in Galatians talked about that too. We have the promise of righteousness. We have the promise of one day bearing that fruit without all of the painful labor it takes now. And for now, in the gap, we have Jesus’ blood. It is the vehicle through which God forgives.

I mentioned before how God let out all of His anger on this one man. The really cool part is what happened next. With the anger gone, God was empty. And the only thing left to fill that void was His love. So when it was all said and done, when He had finished letting Jesus have it with all the power and fury He could muster, God looked down on His Son who endured it all without a single protest and felt a love even bigger than His anger. That anger was intended for every person who ever lived. It covered everything we’ve ever done. And His love is even bigger. Imagine what it will be like when He lets that loose on us!

I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how you forgive someone who hurts you every day, over and over, without any remorse. I don’t know how to forgive something I can’t see. I do know that God loves you. God loves me. And for right now, it’s enough that I believe.