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While Waiting on the Weeds and Wheat

While Waiting on the Weeds and Wheat

Last updated on: July 21, 2026 at 8:23 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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While Waiting on the Weeds and Wheat 2026-07-21T20:23:37-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

a pair of hands planting tomatoes in a much cleaner garden than mine

image via Pixabay

The kingdom of heaven may be likened
to a man who sowed good seed in his field.
While everyone was asleep his enemy came
and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off.
When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.

The slaves of the householder came to him and said,
‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?
Where have the weeds come from?’
He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’
His slaves said to him,
‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds
you might uproot the wheat along with them.
Let them grow together until harvest;
then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters,
“First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning;
but gather the wheat into my barn.”‘

I went out to visit the garden.

This summer is punctuated by soaking, violent rain and then violent heat waves, with the occasional dust storm apocalypse. Because of that, it seems as if the garden is growing by fits and starts. I come out and barely recognize it again and again. There are flowers on that blasted watermelon vine. At this rate, I might actually get a fruit by September. The popcorn is getting tassels. The sweet peppers are green and fat. Jimmy’s boy came over and picked one and sliced it up for a snack. The hot peppers are taking their time to get ripe. We want them nice and red, like an artist’s rendering of peppers, so they’ll be especially spicy for Adrienne’s cooking adventures. We’re all getting antsy with the waiting.

The tomatoes are weighing down the vines, which are in that anxious stage where they droop and look like they’re dying as they rush all the water in the plant to plumping up the fruit. Tomatoes take an agonizingly long time to ripen once they’re the right size. They start out as little marbles, and you think you’ve only got a week or two to wait. Then, weeks later, they turn into fruit that actually looks like a tomato, only the wrong color, and you get excited all over again. Then there’s that stage where they go whitish, with a little bright white star on the bottom, and you’re sure you’re going to eat this time, and it STILL takes a week or two before they start to color. My tomatoes just recently went white, except for a single cherry tomato that had a head start and was already red. I ate the cherry tomato yesterday, and I won’t have another tomato until next month.

There is a strange vine that grew out of the compost, taking over two patches of ground. At first I thought it was cantaloupe, but now I think it’s cucumbers. I won’t be able to see what it is until it’s finished growing.

Most of gardening is waiting, with no promise of how things will work out. I can’t stress that hard enough. Everybody says “it takes a lot of work to grow a garden,” and that’s true, but fewer people say “it takes a lot of biding your time and trying to think of anything else besides a garden so you don’t get too disappointed.” Most of gardening is doing something other than gardening, while the garden grows up without you. You do your part. You plant good seed, you fertilize the soil, you check on the garden regularly and keep the bugs at bay. And then you tidy up your house and go to work, read books and play video games and watch television, and try not to think about the tomato crop very much. All of this is gardening.

It could be that most of the spiritual life is waiting as well.

I used to think it was all about desperately scrambling to tear out everything inside of you that might be sinful and worry constantly about how you would turn out. Now, I don’t see it that way anymore.

We all have good seed and also weeds growing inside of ourselves. You do, and so do I. But we’re not very good at knowing which is which. Maybe you’ve always prided yourself on your excellent patience, but God Who sees all things justly might know that He just blessed you with a very mellow temperament, which isn’t a virtue. It could be that somebody who struggles with their mental health and has to fight and fight to keep an even keel is much more patient than you. Maybe you think you’re generous, when what you really are is well-to-do and extroverted and fond of buying gifts– and that’s not wrong of you. But it’s not the same as the generosity of a poor person breaking their last loaf of bread in half to share with a neighbor. You may think that you are a glutton, when you actually suffer from an eating disorder. You might feel that you’re a coward when you actually struggle with anxiety. Only God is certain which parts of you are really faults, and how culpable you are. And only God can make you what you ought to be anyway.

It’s not that you shouldn’t work on yourself and try to improve. You should. You ought to repent if you get something wrong, and of course you ought to atone and make up with the people you’ve hurt, if you can. You ought to receive the sacraments and set up a habit of prayer for yourself and get to know the saints. But then there’s the rest of your life. There’s the time where you’re living your life, not doing anything that looks spiritual on the surface. You’ll find opportunities to practice virtue there as well. But mundane, everyday things are most of what life is made of. And while you’re living your life, God makes your garden fruitful.

I won’t know exactly what’s come out of my garden until my life is over.

If God were a cruel and narcissistic father who was just waiting to jump out and yell “Gotcha!” this would be a terrifying prospect. I used to be afraid that that was what the Father was. But I think I know better now. I think the Father is kind. I think the Father knows exactly which parts of me are wheat and which are weeds, and loves me anyway. I have come to believe that the Father is a good gardener who plants good seed. I will do my best to bear good fruit. But most of my life should not be spent worrying that I somehow won’t. Most of my life, is just living my life. God is the one who knows what parts of me are weeds. God knows how to sort through the weeds and the wheat. All I can do is try to be wheat, and live my life.

This isn’t what I was taught as a child, but it’s what I believe now.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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