Daily Lesson for May 26, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew 13:24-30 and Psalm 37 verse 20:

24 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

But the wicked will perish;
the enemies of the Lord are like the glory of the pastures;
they vanish—like smoke they vanish away.

A few months back, the morning after yet another horrific terrorist attack in Paris I did what I often do when I get worried about the world. I called my great Aunt Opal, who as one of the first women accepted into in the military during World War II.  Her job as a NAVY WAVE (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) was to process the death information for sailors lost and killed at sea.  For a time she and the rest of her department in Cleveland were busy  both night and day, the death toll was so great and the files so numerous.  Now in her nineties and the last living member of the Greatest Generation in our family, she is for me the personification of History in all its meaning.

I called her after the attack. "Well, what do you think about France?" I asked.

"Well," she said in a chastened yet resolved tone, "I think God is still in control."

Every evil has its day and it's season in the sun.  The weeds of destruction grow up. They flourish for awhile, they seem even to begin to take over. But in the end, at the harvest, their fate is foretold.

At ninety Aunt Opal has seen a lot of harvests.  Weeds have taken seed over and over again, some mightily strong and destructive. Nazism, totalitarianism, Soviet communism, Khmer Rouge, Taliban, now ISIS.  These are all terrifying regimes, and indeed we would perhaps be paralyzed with foreboding of what is to come next, if we did not believe that in the end the harvest finally does come.

While my Aunt Opal was busy processing all those sailors' death records, my grandfather Bill was on a troop transport somewhere out in the Pacific. He told me he thought surely his name would wind up in one of Aunt Opal's files.  He said he didn't believe the War would ever and he didn't think he'd ever come home.

But the War did end; and he did come home and he married my grandmother Betty, Opal's sister.

And at the end of the day it was made clear, God really was still in control.

That's a good thing to remember the next time these troubling times make us afraid.  God was, and is, still in control.