One summer, before my grandaddy died, he got me and my friend, Randy, jobs with a farmer friend of his. I had decided I was done with competitive swimming the year before, so I had time on my hands. And I had a new (read “used”) car that needed gas and insurance and lots of work, so I needed the money. Man, oh, man, I had no idea what I was in for.
I was a bean walker.
I don't know if you know what “walking the beans” means up here, but you may have done something like it. A bunch of kids would arrive in the early morning at the edge of a field owned by the farmer and from then until early afternoon, we would walk between the rows of soybeans, removing the errant corn which had been planted in that same soil the year before, not to mention billions and billions of weeds.
It made a difference when it came to harvest time that anything that wasn't a soybean did not make its way to the scales which weighed that year’s yield. And now over four decades later, when I visit Chattanooga, I'll drive past those same fields and find myself looking to see if corn is sprouting in the beans. I know they are treated chemically now, so there is no need to employ one’s friends' children to walk those fields in the early morning. But I always look to see if the fields are ‘clean’ or not.
Most of those early mornings run together in my memory now, for they all the same. Randy and I would get there and start to work, bending down, grabbing, pulling these stubborn weeds. We had a full days of hard labor along with ample opportunity to cut up and laugh.
I've told y'all about Randy before, so you know he was a crazy dude, always taking the kind of risks that would make you wonder if he wasn't just a bit tetched in the head. That's why I liked him, I think. With Randy around, I could be near danger without being too close.
The first few weeks we had worked using our bare hands to pull the corn and the weeds and leave them to rot away between the rows. By the time we finished on any given day, as I recall, my hands were caked with mud and dirt, hardly able to grip the steering wheel as we drove home.
But then there was a special day – the day we were handed corn hooks. Corn hooks are sharp curved blades attached to the end of a long handle made especially for the purpose of walking through the beans and slicing out the corn stalks and the weeds. No longer would we have to bend over. No longer would my hands be so cramped by the work that I would struggle to hold the steering wheel for the drive home. And it was with a sense of immense relief that Randy and I made our way down our first row that morning.
Only, this happened. You see, earlier, in May, a new movie had come out. You might have heard of it. It was called “Star Wars.” And Randy and I had seen it easily half a dozen times. And to Randy, that corn hook became a light saber, and he started with the “woom”-ing noise and swinging the corn hook around. And I joined in with my own “woom”-ing, fighting Darth Vader, there in the corn rows.
Now, y'all, the blade on a corn hook is sharp, and as I whipped it down, it went right through Randy's shoe and into his foot. So instead of earning more spending money that morning, instead of trudging alongside my other friends down row after row of soybeans, I went with Randy to the emergency room. It was awful, and I felt awful. But Randy, being Randy, took the blame and said he did it to himself playing the goof. Plus he got to have a nice bandage and use crutches and attract all the girls, which was something he never did before.
And I learned a lesson. And it is this.
I cannot be entirely trusted with a corn hook.
In the end, I am likely to do more harm than good if I am the one responsible for separating the wheat from the weeds! Particularly the ones Jesus speaks of now. As with last week’s parable, I struggle to hear this wheat and these weeds as meant to represent individual people. I tend to want to think that perhaps it means that God will separate and burn away all that stuff that is weedy in each of us.
This way of thinking has only become only more true over my lifetime as I have been given the opportunity to see and understand the weediness in all of our stories from time to time. But even if it is the case that Jesus’ teaching now talks about some people actually being wheat and others being weeds, then we are told at the end of the story that it isn’t ours to judge, to separate out, to dispose of the weeds. And, if this is the case, there is great comfort in knowing God will sort it out in the end.
And not me.
As I read this story again the other day, I remembered words my grandaddy used to say when I would complain of this or that: “All bills get paid.”
His way of saying ‘the chickens coming home to roost,’ or ‘it will all come out in the wash, or just ‘karma.’ And it's easy to buy that most times.
But I don't know, y'all. Because I can't get something out of my mind: an off-and-on interaction with someone that from time to time can be just too much to deal with. He's more burden than delight. If he were a balance sheet, he'd be mostly liability, I suppose. And so often, I am so frustrated with his actions that I fail to hear his cri de cour, his cry from the heart. If he were a weed, and I had a corn hook, well...I'm ashamed to say how quickly I'd act.
And so it is that I am in awe when I witness the grace that is extended by God through others, especially his family, to one who I (in the smallness of my own heart) might have thought did not quite deserve it. And I am in awe when I witness this same grace in other acts in a world that so often seems so graceless. Acts of love and justice, kindness and generosity, selfless acts of compassion to those who are seen only as weeds.
Most of the time, I suppose, it is not ours to see or fully understand. We can't ever entirely know what has shaped the ones growing alongside us, and we cannot ever know what God has in store, regardless of how weedy they (or we) appear.
And so in this meantime, we live in the promise that it is all in God’s strong and tender and ever-discerning hands. God’s Hands, which, no doubt, will always handle a ‘corn hook’ better than I ever will!