I planted more good seeds in the bean patch. This time I didn’t bother to carefully poke holes; I just grabbed a handful of seed and scattered it onto the mud. These beans made it, but barely; I carefully removed the slugs and surrounded each sprout with a magic circle of diatomaceous earth. They grew up sickly and ragged.
Midsummer came. I harvested my onions, and scattered beans all through the patch for a late summer crop. But I had no clippings left for mulching, and I had no strength anyway. The heat and heat-related sickness had set in in earnest. I was stuck for a few weeks. From inside, I sadly watched my garden get overgrown with grass. Grass grew alongside the beans, indistinguishable at first from the good sprouts. Then it grew taller, and then the garden was a mess, a prairie of grasses and clover and pokeweed. I would go outside just before dark to pick tomatoes and zucchini for supper, if I had the strength, but I couldn’t stop the weeds.
Yesterday, the weather finally began to cool. I noticed that my un-mulched late-summer bush beans were ready for harvesting. Rose and I went outside. I told her it was like an Easter egg hunt, gathering beans among the tall grass.
We found more beans than I’d ever seen in one place before. More beans than we’d had all year, all healthy and with barely any slug damage. A rainbow of mixed color beans, more than I could have hoped for. Rose munches them raw; I cook them in butter for dinner. We’ll be munching and cooking until frost, because the beans keep coming. I’ll go out and pick another bucket tomorrow.
It turns out that mulching, while it keeps the weeds down, makes it easier for the slugs to scoot around the garden. They need a nice, clear, slick path. The grass deters them. It provides a barrier, a kind of hiding place.
The parable still works, too. The Master has his reasons for permitting the grass. I don’t claim to know which of my neighbors is a good plant and which is a weed; only God knows that, and He declines to judge until the end of time when all will see clearly. Besides, through the mystery of grace, any weed can become a good plant if he wishes. All he needs to do is ask the Master, and be willing to change. So it doesn’t matter to me whether my neighbor is a good plant or a blade of grass. Either way, my neighbor protects me from the slugs. My neighbor, whatever he is, protects me from the vices that threaten to eat me alive. The daily challenge of living with my neighbor is a constant struggle to live in charity and grace. When my neighbor hurts me and spoils the look of my garden, the Master uses that neighbor to sanctify me all the more– not because the Master wishes for there to be strife, but because if strife is handy, strife is what He uses to sanctify me. He uses whatever I have, and in this life I have my neighbor.
Someday, the Master’s servants will come to the field and have their own Easter egg hunt for a rainbow of risen souls. Then, we’ll know grass from healthy plants. Until then, we shouldn’t be troubled.
Next year, we’ll be strategic. My servants, or at least my daughter and I, will plant our corn patch on the property border so the next door neighbors won’t see any tall grass. They’ll have a show of brilliant, majestic cornstalks, a living fence of popcorn and sweet corn to protect them from the eyesore of my yard. And when they inevitably look askance anyway, I’ll remember the parable and practice my charity. But I’ll go ahead and let the grass grow tall among the bush beans without heavy mulching.
Everything truly is grace.
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