Thorny soil: “Other seeds fell among thorns that shot up and choked out the
tender blades.” (Matthew
13:7) The seeds in this soil end up growing quite
well. At least well enough to produce plants, tender blades. So what’s the
problem? Unchecked weeds, growing up alongside the seedlings, end up choking
the life out of the plants. The plants die. The storyteller explains: “The
thorny ground represents those who hear and accept the Good News, but all too
quickly the message is crowded out by the cares of this life and the lure of
wealth, so no crop is produced.” (Matthew
13:22)
Have you noticed how easy it is to give
attention to the loudest voices in your life? But often the loudest aren’t
necessarily the most important. We use the phrase “the squeaky wheel gets the
grease” to describe the positive nature of repetitive urgings, whether by an
employee to a boss or someone who’s just trying to get something from another.
Unfortunately, though that paradigm often holds true and may help us get the
resources needed to accomplish what we’re trying to do, it also suggests a
reality that can prevent us from focusing on the most significant things.
If we only pay attention to the loudest voices
in our lives, we may very well not end up being fruitful. For example, for many
of us our work demands constant consideration. The voice of our employer speaks
very loudly and urgently. But if that’s the only voice we listen to, we’ll end
up turning a deaf ear to other voices that may be even more important in the
long run; a spouse, a significant other, a child, a parent, the voice of
conscience, the inner spirit that calls us to stop activity and be still long
enough to reflect upon our values, the depth of our hearts, eternal issues.
As Jesus pointed out in this story, we can so
easily be lured away from the significant by the cares of life and the
obsessive pursuit of wealth. Those things become like the weeds that choke life
out of the tender plant. “The soul ceases to draw nourishment from Christ, and
spirituality dies out of the heart.” (White 1941, p. 51.)
We come to the end of our lives and wonder about
significance and realize we only listened to the loudest voices that demanded
our immediate attention. We neglected the most important ones. Richard Foster,
the noted writer about spirituality, has said, “The desperate need today is not
for a great number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep
people.”
As this story graphically indicates, there is no
way to cultivate depth and fertile soil which results in great fruitfulness and
fulfillment unless attention is paid to the subsurface of our lives, unless
we’re willing to be bold and confront the weeds of life, to do whatever it takes
to spend time paying attention to the right voices, to actually be still and
listen, especially to God’s voice. To neglect the right voices results in a sad
end.
Frederick Beuchner, one of today’s more profound
spiritual writers, tells about his mother who died a very lonely death as an
old woman. She never learned how to listen to the right voices. “She was by no
means heartless, but I think hers was a heart that, who knows why, was rarely
if ever touched in its deepest place. … Being beautiful was her business, her
art, her delight, and it took her a long way and earned her many dividends, but
when, as she saw it, she lost her beauty, she was like a millionaire who runs
out of money. She took her name out of the phone book and got an unlisted number.
With her looks gone she felt she had nothing left to offer the world, to
propitiate the world. So what she did was simply to check out of the world—that
old, last rose of summer—the way Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich checked out
of it, holing themselves up somewhere and never venturing forth except in
disguise. My mother holed herself up in her apartment, then in just one room of
that apartment, then in just one chair in that room, and finally, in the bed
where one morning, perhaps in her sleep, she died at last.”
It’s too easy to pay more attention to the
loudest voices in our worlds; the voices that shout to us about who they think
we should be, that we’re only valuable for what we possess or buy or influence
or wear or accumulate or accomplish. Even weeds sometimes look attractive. So
we’re tempted to keep them growing alongside us. But we neglect to pull the
weeds at our own peril. Listening to the wrong voices always has a painful end.
Ignoring the right Voice reaps a bitter harvest.
