This might come as a surprise to many of you – to others maybe not so much – but I am not the most patient person. In fact, I’m not really that patient at all. You can ask my brother priests about that and they will absolutely agree with that statement, especially Fr. Martin. I can get so frustrated when I have to wait for something. That especially comes out in traffic. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, Fr. Shenoy told Lt. Cribbs, our State Trooper, that if he wanted to give someone a speeding ticket just to wait on Apopka Vineland for me to drive by.

I think our culture of instant gratification – thanks to the Internet and social media, thanks to Amazon Prime and UberEats, thanks to Netflix and other streaming platforms – has made the problem of impatience worse. Think about it: we can pretty much find any information we need, talk to anyone, purchase and receive goods, watch TV shows and movies whenever we want, however we want, and wherever we want. And those things are great! They have made our lives easier in some respects. But they have bred a radical kind of impatience within so many of us. In today’s readings the Lord is challenging us a bit with our idea of patience. He is inviting us to consider how truly good things require patience.

Our first reading comes from the Book of Wisdom, which was written about 50 years prior to the coming of Christ by a member of the Jewish community in Alexandria. The author wanted to convey a specific message to his Jewish brothers and sisters. He wanted to build up their faith, to strengthen and encourage them during a time when they had experienced suffering and oppression. In this particular section of the Book, the author is bringing back memories of the Exodus, when God was victorious over the rulers of the Jewish people and brought the Chosen People to a land of freedom, how He was merciful to the Jewish people during that time despite all the things they had done to turn away from Him – think back to the worshipping of idols, the Golden Calf, the complaining in the desert, all those things.

Today’s passage reminds us how God exercised His mercy in those times and how He exercises His mercy now. It says: “But though You are master of might, You judge with clemency, and with much lenience You govern us.” It is emphasizing God’s power, but, most importantly, how that power is displayed most strongly in His exercise of mercy. God is so powerful and wise that He doesn’t need to be vengeful and quick to punish. Instead, He can afford to let His enemies live because, in the end, despite all their efforts to destroy Him, those enemies can never and will never prevail. In fact, given some time, those enemies might actually be brought to a moment of repentance and conversion.

That’s also something we are reminded of in our Gospel today through the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus tells us that we are the field of God. Our hearts are the ground that He works, the soil He prepares. Our faith, our relationship with Him is the wheat that He nurtures. We are the people He rests His hopes upon and the people in whom He plants good seed. But there are also weeds among this wheat that are sown in the world and within our hearts by the Enemy. Those weeds can be hurts or wounds that have been inflicted upon us or lies that we have believed about ourselves; they can be unhealthy attachments to material things or other people; they can be sins that we have committed or those habitual vices that we struggle to overcome; they are things that ultimately prevent us from reaching our full potential.

In the parable, God is wise and patient; He allows the wheat and weeds to coexist, the good and evil to dwell alongside each other. But He does so in the hopes that we might allow His mercy into our hearts and be brought to conversion before the harvest, before time runs out and the day of judgment comes. It’s meant to be an invitation for us to recognize how we are all sinners in some capacity, that we all do things where we turn away from God, that we all have areas of our hearts in need of God’s love and mercy.

As His sons and daughters, the Father gives us time to repent. He patiently waits for us to recognize our need for Him. In that waiting, He pours out His grace into our hearts every day so that we can hopefully experience a moment of transformation, so that the Holy Spirit can work within us and help us grow in our love for the Lord more and more. But we have to cooperate with that. We have to be willing to invite Him into those areas of our lives where the weeds are running rampant so that He can take care of them, so that He can enrich the soil better.

When we discover areas of sinfulness in our hearts, areas of weakness; when we experience something painful, a moment of suffering; when someone hurts us in some way; when we have a moment of doubt about God’s love for us; when we question our purpose in life and seem lost with no direction…what do we do with those moments? Do we turn to the Lord and invite Him into those areas of our hearts or do we keep Him out of those areas?

Here’s the thing: the Lord doesn’t want us to hold back those things from Him. He wants us to bring them to the light, He wants us to surrender those things to Him because He knows how to deal with them. He knows what we need to ensure that the weeds don’t become so widespread that they end up choking the wheat and stunting its growth. The Evil One is the one who wants us to stay stuck in the shame of those weeds because he knows if we keep those things in the dark that he can control us with them. The weeds are those things that make us feel unworthy of God’s love, that we can never be good enough to get into Heaven, that we aren’t good enough to go out and share the Gospel. The Enemy knows if God is allowed into those areas of our hearts that only good can come from that, that we’ll be brought closer to the Father and more secure in His love.

Many of us might be getting impatient with ourselves in terms of areas where we know we need to grow. We might be thinking: I wish this area of sin in my life would go away. Or maybe: I want to grow in my relationship with the Lord, but the more work I put into it the harder it’s getting. Or maybe: why am I the only one in my family who is striving to grow closer to the Lord, practicing my faith, going to Mass? Lord, when are you going to work in the hearts of my family?

We have to trust the Lord’s timing. We have to believe that He is working behind the scenes in our lives, working at enriching the soil of our hearts and the hearts of others to lead us to a bountiful harvest. That isn’t easy trusting Him there; it isn’t easy being patient with how the Lord is working, but it can be done.

Today, as we come forward to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, let’s ask Him to give us a special outpouring of the grace of patience, that we can learn to trust His timing. Tonight, let’s open that door and invite the Lord into those areas where the weeds are growing, asking the Lord to show us His love and mercy so that on the day of harvest we might be gathered into His barn.

Photo: Wheat field, Laprida, Argentina by Paz Arando. Used under Unsplash license.