The Ruined Field : A Somewhat Belabored Parable
by Sidney Carton
For the record, this post deals with issues of a religious nature. As such, it may be considered trite, and/or treacly in nature. If such material offends, annoys or bothers you, the author highly encourages you to seek out more edifying reading. You have been warned.
There are days in which I look up from the still-smoking ruins of the latest drama to unfold in my insignificant life and stare into the heavens to interrogate the God in whom I claim to believe. I look up to him and ask him a question that is all-too-familiar in both its bitter disappointment and momentary despair:
“Why Lord? Why did you have me clear this piece of ground? Why did you have me dig out the brush and break the soil? Why did you have me plant the precious seeds of hope and expectation into this ground, dig the canals to irrigate the field, weed it, dung it, worry over it during the day and pray for it during the night? Why did you have me go to all that work, and learn to love that which I labored over, if you knew that, despite my best efforts, the Adversary was going to overrun the whole of my works, burn my crops and seed my field with salt? If it was all for naught Lord, why did you have me do it in the first place?”
Now in reality I am not a farmer. Indeed, if the strawberry bushes and pepper plant in my backyard are any indication, my family will have much to fear for should their ability to eat ever be solely dependent on my agricultural skills. I do labor in a vineyard, but one that is metaphysical in nature. Instead of plants I help care for those of the Lord’s children that he places under my stewardship. Sometimes the field is fruitful and flourishes with little effort on my part, sometimes great effort is required to help encourage even the slightest growth. And sometimes, for all the best intentions, efforts and desires, the field is trampled under the iron heels of the Adversary, whose only delight is in laying waste the hopes and faith of men and women so that they “may be miserable, even as he is” (2 Nephi 2:27).
It is on those terrible days, in the aftermath of lost faith, ruined hopes and fresh despair that the sadly familiar “why” issues forth from the bile in my lacerated soul. Why is it that the things we put the greatest effort into seem, inevitably, to be the things that are destroyed with the greatest nonchalance by the Adversary? How does he know what will hurt the most? How does a loving God allow this to happen and not become a callous monster? And finally, why, after we have mourned our mourning and shed our tears, will we gather up the spent embers, clear away the debris, and start again?
I am not as naive as I might seem and my questions are rhetorical. Yet the pain evinced in them is quite real. In my three short decades of life I have seen many wonderful, blessed souls (a great number of whom are personally dear to me) who have been degraded, despised and even destroyed by the spiritual abattoir we refer to as life. While I bear my own spiritual scars, they are nothing in comparison to the maiming I have seen dealt out to others, often the tenderest and fairest among us. And for no other reason than that it pleased the depraved author of our sorrows to see them suffer.
Do I blame God for this? No. I know that many would say that I ought to. That the presence of such blatant injustice and viciousness among his creations stand as stark testimony against his supposed justice and mercy. Yet I cannot fully agree with such an assertion. For while spiritual shrapnel has left me bleeding from a thousand gaping wounds, I am reminded that I understand (at least in the academic sense) that “it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2: 11). Or, rendered more simply, that without adversity, life has no meaning whatsoever. I may have a cursory understanding of the doctrine of moral agency, but I doubt I’ll learn to love it on this side of the veil.
In the end I know why we were asked to (metaphorically) plant the field. It is in the experience of the planting and the nourishing and the laboring and the striving that we grow and are enriched. Even the experience of loss, of seeing our works laid waste, is ultimately to our benefit. In losing that which we labored so dearly for, we gain the slightest understanding of our Father in Heaven’s sorrow at the loss of his own wayward children. Finally, in taking up the debris of past failures, we are both enriched, as our new attempt will benefit from all that we learned in our prior plantings and we are strengthened as we assert through our persistence a faith that the work going on in our fields is eternal in nature and will eventually outlast those who periodically lay them waste.
So in a moment I will take up my shovel again. I will clear the smoking embers from my fields and start again, come what may. But give me a short moment, just a moment, to mourn the young plants trampled down before their harvest time.
