When the Hard Thing Is Real — and Not the Whole Story

There was once a farmer who had a good horse. One morning the horse got out of the gate and ran off. The neighbors came over and said, “That’s terrible. You’ve lost your horse. What bad luck.” The farmer looked at them and said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

A couple of days later the horse came back. It brought three wild horses with it. The neighbors were excited. “Look at that. Now you’ve got four horses. What good luck.” The farmer said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

The next week the farmer’s son was trying to train one of the new horses. The horse threw him, and the boy broke his leg. The neighbors shook their heads. “That’s awful. Now your son can’t help you on the farm. What bad luck.” The farmer said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Not long after that, the army came through looking for young men to take to war. They went house to house. When they got to the farmer’s place and saw the boy’s broken leg, they left him behind. The neighbors said, “You’re so lucky your son doesn’t have to go.” The farmer said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

That story is older than the Gospels. It makes a simple point. You cannot tell, from the first thing that happens, what the last thing will be. Something that looks like pure loss may not stay that way. Something that looks like good luck may not stay that way either.

In Matthew chapter 13, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus tells another story about a field that is not only good. A man sows good seed. At night an enemy sows weeds in the same ground. When the plants come up, the workers can see both. They want to pull the weeds right away. The owner says no. If you pull the weeds now, you will pull up the wheat with them. Let both grow until the harvest. Then they can be sorted.

The weed Jesus is talking about is called darnel. When it first comes up, it looks like wheat. Even the grain looks similar before it is ripe. Darnel takes water, food, and sun from the wheat. It does not give you anything you can eat. The grain is toxic. So the weed in the story is not a mild nuisance. It is something that looks like the good plant and works against it.

Jesus later explains the parable. The field is the world. The wheat are the children of God. The weeds come from the devil. The harvest is the end of time. I am not asking you to settle every part of that explanation today. I am asking you to notice the situation we actually live in. Good and evil are in the same field. The suffering is real. The question people have asked for a long time is why God lets the enemy plant anything at all.

I have my own stories of that kind of suffering. I had a serious case of asthma. The medicines that control it now were not available then. A couple of times I came close to dying. I know some people do die from asthma. I have wondered if that suffering was necessary. Couldn’t God just take the asthma away, and the other illnesses with it?

St. Augustine, writing in the 300s, said God is powerful enough to bring good out of evil. He was not saying evil is good. He was saying evil does not get to finish the story.

The Cross is the clearest picture of that. Christians say the greatest evil that ever happened on this earth was the killing of Jesus. It was the largest darnel plant there has ever been. Christians also say the greatest good came from that same event. Jesus’ death and rising opened the way for the grace we live on, the sacraments, even the Eucharist. The killing was not good. It did not get the last word.

Eight hundred years later, St. Thomas Aquinas said the same thing in another way. If God permitted no evil at all, many good things would never come to be. I cannot map that onto every hour I spent fighting for air. I do not have a neat sentence that makes the asthma worth it. I have made a choice to trust that God can bring good out of what I could not fix. I made that choice because I have watched it happen in other parts of my life.

Here is one of those parts. The company I worked for closed the satellite offices and pulled everyone toward the Bay Area. My wife and I were going to lose the life we had. We would say goodbye to family and friends. We would sell the house. We moved here. I tried hard to get another engineering job. That did not happen. At the time it felt like I was eating darnel. It was a struggle. The work I have now is better than I knew to ask for. I still find that hard to believe.

That is the farmer’s story in ordinary clothes. The first thing that happened was not the last thing that happened.

So here is what I am driving at. We live in a mixed field. There is real wheat and there is real darnel. The asthma was not imaginary. Losing that job and packing up our lives was not imaginary. Evil is not a theory. It is toxic, and it competes for the same light and water the good things need.

When the hard thing shows up, I try to remember the farmer. I try to remember the Cross. I try to stay open to the good that can still grow, even while the weeds are easy to see.

If you are in the middle of something that looks like pure loss, you do not have to pretend it is fine. You also do not have to decide today what the whole story will be. Say what the farmer said. “Maybe. We’ll see.” Then do one good thing that is in front of you. Make the call. Take the walk. Sit with the person. Pray the prayer you can actually pray.

This is a time to grow. The harvest will come. Until then we live in the field with both the wheat and the darnel, trusting the God who knows how to turn even what is toxic into something good.

This is a pastoral reflection, not clinical care and not a substitute for it. If you or someone you love is in immediate danger, call 988 or local emergency services.

Drawn from a homily first preached in 2026