Good and bad. Wheat and weed. Life sustaining and life destroying. They co-exist until the end of our earthly life when the harvest arrives. “The harvest is the end of the world”, or the end of our time here. Then a permanent divide will separate for eternity, good from bad. Which side will we end up?

Along the way of our earthly journey, the sower who sowed us in his field will nurture our growth and protect us from harm. He will guard his wheat from the weeds. “There is no God other than you who cares for everything”. In other words, however complicated things get in life for us, we must know and believe that God is in everything, even the tiniest, seemingly most insignificant event of our day.

So bad things can, and will, happen to us in life. This is not God’s doing but the consequence of the weeds in our life. God only allowed co-existence and that day will come when he doesn’t. If that day is today, will all of us make it to the good side? So, he has “remained mild in judgement and govern us with great lenience”. And has kindly given us a lifetime to make sure we get onto the good side.

We are never left alone each day in our lifetime. Little seeds fall into our life every day. Most of them so small, they are unnoticed. Often they appear in small gestures of kindness or comforting and encouraging words from people around us. Often too the details are so tiny that we cannot yet see any link to what is happening and our limited human mind brush them away as ‘coincidences’.

The good news is that there are no coincidences in life. God cares for everything. He works every day, actually every moment, to untangle us wheat from the choking effect of the darnel. He is ahead of us on our earthly journey and somewhere further up the road, we will find repairs to our hurt and ‘coincidences’ as the work of the Divine; tiny little patterns, intricate in details sewed together in the Sower’s time into a beautiful tapestry that is our personal life on earth.

In the words of a friend, who encountered a little act of kindness this week from a stranger, shared, “Hold on to the little things with mustard seed faith, take heart that the smallest gestures can also move mountains”.

Seeds become wheat which become flour. Mustard seeds become big trees of shelter. The journey of our earthly life is this process. We are good seeds sown by the Sower into this world to become good people. First we make sure that we remain as wheat and then collectively as a wheat field fight off the harming effect of the darnel to become flour to make bread.

The world is a wheat field, its produce is life sustaining bread. A little bit of yeast will help three measures of flour rise to become the bread of life. We are sharers of this bread. Little gestures from strangers are like yeast to our faith life. We are called to be this stranger to others, to be the yeast in their loaf. Yes, please!

 

 

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time