Let It Grow: The Parable of the Weeds and the Long Patience of Parenting

There's a particular kind of worry that shows up once your kids are grown. It's quieter than the toddler years, when the dangers were physical and close — the stairs, the road, the hot stove — and you could just put your body between the child and the harm. The worry of the grown child is slower, and there's almost nothing you can do with it. You watch them make a call you'd never make. A year goes by, then another, and the shape of a life still isn't coming into focus. There's the friend group you'd not have picked, the faith held loosely or quietly put down, the drift where you'd hoped for direction. And every instinct in you is screaming: do something. Pull it out before it takes hold.

That instinct is exactly the one Jesus warns us about in this Sunday's Gospel.

The field the enemy sowed

The parable's short. A man sows good seed in his field. While everyone's asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds through the wheat, then disappears. When the crop comes up, the servants spot the problem and go to the owner with the obvious, zealous question: "Do you want us to go and pull them up?"

He says no. "No, because when you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat with them. Let them grow together until the harvest."

It helps to know what the weed actually is. The plant here is darnel — and darnel is so close to wheat when it's young that even a good farmer can't reliably tell them apart. They come up looking identical. The difference only shows much later, when the ears form: the wheat carries grain, and the darnel is hollow. By then the roots underneath have grown into each other, tangled, so ripping out the one tears up the other.

So the owner isn't being soft. He's not shrugging at the fact that an enemy has been busy in his field. He just knows two things his servants don't. He knows you can't tell yet, this early, which is which. And he knows that yanking things out in a panic destroys the very thing you're trying to save.

The parent as the anxious servant

I see myself in those servants a bit too clearly. Their question isn't malicious — it comes from loving the field and hating what's spoiled it. They want it fixed now. And they're wrong. Not for caring, but for thinking the fix is to reach in and pull.

Because here's the thing: you can't pull the weeds out of your children. Not by force. You can't extract the doubt, the aimlessness, the wrong crowd, the dumb decision, by sheer strength, without also tearing at something living and good that's grown up right next to it — the trust between you, their sense that home is a safe place to fall flat, their freedom to become themselves instead of a nervous copy of you. Reach in hard enough and yes, you might clear the weed. You'll pull up wheat with it too. And some of that wheat doesn't grow back.

There's a deeper reason, and it's the one I keep having to relearn. The thing I actually want for my kids isn't something I could plant by force in the first place. I don't want children who are Catholic because I scared them into it, or well-behaved because pushing back cost too much, or driven because I couldn't handle watching them sit still. I want faith that's theirs by conviction, not just handed down. A life they chose rather than one I assigned. And that kind of wheat — the real kind, with grain in the ear — grows slow, and you can't manufacture it. It has to be allowed. Which means, annoyingly, it has to be risked.

The harvest is real. It's just not today.

None of this is an excuse to do nothing, and the parable won't let it become one. There is a harvest. The reckoning is real; the field doesn't just run wild forever. But the sorting is the owner's job, on the owner's clock — not the servants' anxious Tuesday-afternoon schedule. What's asked of them in the meantime is the hard part: let it grow together. Live with the mixed field. Sit with a story that's obviously unfinished and not, out of fear, force an ending before it's ready.

My kids are somewhere in that middle season right now — the long green stretch where you honestly can't tell what's wheat and what's weed, because it's all still coming up young and undifferentiated. The stuff that looks like drift might be the slow forming of the ear. The season I'm tempted to write off might be the one that ends up carrying the grain. I don't get to know that this early. Neither did the servants.

So I'm trying to learn the patience the owner has — which turns out to be the patience God has with the whole tangled field of us. He's not naive about the weeds; an enemy really did sow them, and he says so plainly. He just won't pre-judge a crop that hasn't headed yet. He lets the rain fall on the promising and the disappointing alike. He's playing the long game — for the harvest, not for a garden that looks tidy this afternoon.

That's the God I keep asking my children to trust. It would help if I trusted him the same way with them.