Let the weeds grow, Jesus says in this week’s gospel. Or more precisely, let the weeds and the wheat grow together. If you have seen the island in the front of my house, it would seem that I have taken this parable to heart. I’ve always loved the daffodils that adorn the island in the springtime, but lately, it’s become overtaken by crownvetch, a most unwelcome weed in this place. Efforts to eradicate the crownvetch – including using a rototiller as my neighbor recommended – would surely take out the poor daffodil bulbs, too.

It’s a generous interpretation to suggest that I am trying to garden the way God does in my island by letting the weedy crownvetch grow. I confess that my garden experiment reflects my limited time and energy more than anything else. But it does give me a visible illustration of what I know to be true: God has the patience to keep tending to a worldly garden that is mixed, the good with the bad, the welcome and the unwanted. God is not troubled by the mess or the eyesore. God is faithful, confident that the harvest will be plentiful in the fullness of time, even when current conditions invite skepticism.

I don’t share God’s patience, untroubled perspective or faithful confidence – for my little island garden or for the metaphorical garden of this world.

Sometimes – maybe even oftentimes – it feels like we should grab the rototiller and start fresh. Or roll up our sleeves and get down on our hands and needs to painstakingly pull the unwelcome intruders – the ones destroying all that is good in the gardens of our lives. It’s tempting to think we can – and we should – eliminate the weeds.

But God says that’s not our job.

Rather than weeding, our job is to tend to the good seed that God has planted. We tend with the fertilizer that good seed needs to grow: we heap loads of love upon the gardens of this world. We support and encourage and offer respite to the fellow workers in this garden-kingdom. We bring our laments and heartaches to God in prayer. We practice forgiveness, replanting the stems that get uprooted, restoring them to the soil.

And we cling to the hope that Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans: the hope for what we do not see, like my daffodils that are surely still there, waiting to burst forth in the springtime, underneath the bed of crownvetch.

We tend to the good seed God has planted, we cling to the hope that does not disappoint, and we let God do the rest.