Daffodils & Deferment
We 
had a remarkably beautiful day yesterday. A rare sunny, 80 degree gem for so early in April. My wife & I spent the day working in the yard, reclaiming it from the general mayhem that Winter had left. We cleaned up all the sticks, raked up all the leaves that had been hidden under three months of snow, and bagged up all the yard garbage.
There are a few bulbs hidden in the earth of our garden. Most of the year they sit dark, dormant, and forgotten. Bur early every Spring, they are the stars of the show, as the flowers break through the thawing ground, the first of the plants to come back every year. We’ve got several yellow daffodils that have returned just in the last week. They are a vivid down payment from the garden that is regenerating.
So I’m raking through the garden, scraping up the decomposed & moldy leaves that are plastered to the ground like paper-mache. It’s not real exact work. Flattened leaves, dead plants, and dry woody stalks all come out as the teeth of the rake chew through the remains of last years garden. The rake doesn’t discriminate; everything in it’s path is purged. I try to be somewhat careful, but there’s a lot of garden and only so much time, so sacrifices have to be made.
The first time I raked up one of the new daffodils, I felt kind of bad about it. I pushed it under the pile of leaves, so my wife wouldn’t see. The second daffodil to go down was given to my daughter, who was not all that excited to get a broken, disjointed flower, but put it behind her ear anyway. The third casualty was unceremoniously swept into the pile with the rest; by this time I had resigned to the knowledge that a few daffodils was just the cost of doing business.
Made me think of Jesus’ words in Matthew 13:24-30. Here Jesus tells the parable of the weeds. In Jesus’ story, a man plants a field of wheat, but an enemy secretly scatters weed seeds in the field as well. As the wheat & the weeds grow together, the farmhands suggest that they pull up the weeds. But the farmer declines, telling them that the wheat & the weeds are so intertwined, that to pull the bad plants out would destroy the good ones as well. He decides to let them all grow together and sort them out after the crop is harvested.
So here is where the farmer & I acted differently. Where I was willing to mangle a few daffodils for the sake of expediency, God isn’t willing to sacrifice even one of his, even if it means that evil & it’s effects aren’t annihilated right away. So evil men continue on, and the effects of sin march forward in the midst of what God is accomplishing; not realizing that their judgment is deferred. All will receive justice or grace, but it doesn’t have to be right away.
While this parable wasn’t meant to be the complete answer to the aged question of why evil is allowed to continue, it does get us a good way down that road. God is always looking at both the good of the individual and the good of the whole. Most of the time those both conflict with what we want right now. It’s up to us to trust him, even when it seems like bad things are allowed to go on unchecked, or that selfish people are getting away with whatever they want. God is not willing that any one of his should perish, even if it means that evil has to wait a little longer to be extinguished.
