It’s summer, my favorite season. Our backyard transforms from a sloppy spring mess into something lush, verdant, green, pulsating with weeds, dandelions, but also raspberries, hyacinths, hydrangeas, roses, chocolate mint, thyme, oregano, rosemary, marigolds, green onions, blueberries, and blue coneflowers. These are the usual summer partiers, but every year I add something new. This year, sweet potato vines creep around the cyclone fence, and the red bell pepper plant arcs over its cage, weighed down with green peppers on the cusp of changing to red.
This year, I also planted baby’s breath from seed. The seed packet came wrapped in a trio of packets, a May birthday gift from my youngest daughter. I strewed the seeds, covered them with shallow soil in the raised garden bed, and hoped for germination (because it’s not always a given). A week or so later, the seedlings were arcing their way toward the sky but so was an invasive, shallow-rooted weed that was springing up all over the garden bed. The weed threatened to choke out my seedlings, so every day, I gingerly—tenderly—pinched and uprooted the “weedlings” growing up around the baby’s breath.
It was delicate work, and as I bent over the raised bed I remembered Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the chaff. In the parable, the servants ask the master, “Do you want us to go pull up [the weeds in the field]?” The master answers with a firm “no” because, he says, “while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.”1
The memory gave me pause as I rooted and pinched around the baby’s breath seedlings. And for a few days I decided to let them grow a little higher, root a little deeper, before tackling the weeds closest to them. Better safe than sorry and all that.
While Jesus, in his original context, was using the parable to describe to his disciples what the kingdom of heaven is generally like, I’m aware that the kingdom of heaven is also at work in me, specifically, as it is in you and as it is in all creation.
And because I am habitually obsessed with gardening metaphors, and because I have some very real weeds entwined around some real seedlings in the garden, the parable got me thinking about what’s growing from the soil of my life right now.
For the past three years, I’ve been in a season that was unexpected in quality, variety of experience, and duration. I didn’t want a future as an elementary orchestra teacher, and yet I taught orchestra for three months at seven schools in our district—painstakingly tuning violins, gingerly restringing cellos, waving my hands around like a real-life conductor while the fifth-grade ensemble played Hot Cross Buns. I hadn’t planned a career as a high school English teacher, and yet, for three months, I graded essays and consulted rubrics with the utmost attention and care. Additionally, I served for six months as an interim pastor at a church an hour from my home, and it was good to find out that pastoring God’s people felt a little bit like riding a bike. I knew how to love and shepherd them—it wasn’t hard—but I knew they weren’t the people I was supposed to serve indefinitely.
And now, I’m teaching the English language to immigrants and refugees at a local community college, and it’s not what I envision doing forever even if I think I’m good at it, even if I feel a little bit like a pastor in this setting, even if I love my students, even if this work matters, and even though their education is high-stakes (the difference between making a true living wage and continuing to work at Walmart while supporting children and displaced elderly family members abroad).
What I miss in this season is pastoring people, as a vocation, in a congregational setting, over an extended period of time.
What is a weed if not something we didn’t intend to grow, something that apparently displaces that which we desire? The weeds might be beautiful and robust, colorful and alive, and yet unwanted, apparently crowding out the plants we would prefer bear fruit. If each of my vocational experiences during the summer of my mid-forties was something growing in the garden of my life, I surely would have plucked them out in favor of a harvest of my own design.
As time passes, however, I’ve become gradually aware that there is something else springing up in my garden alongside these unplanned vocational excursions. It seems that Master-Gardener Jesus snuck some seeds in the soil under cover of night, without my notice. To root out all the seemingly random vocational experiences would be to forgo the sort of harvest I sense he’s keen on me reaping.
How do I describe that harvest?
It consists partly of a deeper knowing of who I am no matter what I am doing, a knowing of what values shape my life whether I am in vocational ministry or teaching myself to play Mary Had a Little Lamb poorly so I can teach eleven-year-olds to play Mary Had a Little Lamb poorly. The harvest consists partly of a deeper freedom to live integriously without the constant temptation we pastors have to “perform” our integrity on a platform or in an office (because it’s our job and people expect us to). The harvest consists partly of greater confidence in my own relationship with God apart from vocational identifiers and titles. And, it consists of better sight and deeper love for people of all walks of life, ages, skin colors, religions, and cultural backgrounds—churched and unchurched. If and when my vocation takes me back to a full-time ministry context, I won’t be the person or pastor I was before.
To appreciate a harvest-in-the-making is a prophetic act of trust in Master-Gardener Jesus. Not only that, we are invited to trust him in every season no matter what he allows to grow in our lives. The weeds we’d rather pluck up and toss in the fire will always be with us. These unwelcome visitors are inconvenient, distasteful, disappointing, and sometimes heartbreakingly painful. Should we uproot them, we risk uprooting the harvest he wants us to reap.
Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.
Matt 13:24-30