Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly, and welcome to Feed Your Soul. This Sunday's reading is about people messing with you. Do you have anyone messing with you at the moment? Let's have a read. It's from Matthew's gospel, 13:24-30. Jesus put another parable before them, saying, "The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' The servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No, lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them. Let them 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, and gather the wheat into my barn.'"

So this guy sowed his wheat. The enemies come, sow the weeds. It's messing with him. I think at different times in our lives, we all have people messing with us, and-- so what's the story about? I think that we think of the field as the world, and we think of the wheat as the good people, and we think of the weeds as the bad people. And that's certainly, I think, one way to look at it, but another way, I think, to look at it is to say, okay, yes, the field, that's the world. The wheat is the good action of our lives. The weeds, the questionable actions in our lives, of which we all have. And very often, we want to split things into good people and bad people, and one of the great challenges is to see the good and the not-so-good in ourselves and to recognize that that exists in us; that exists in other people; we're all struggling to work through that. If we look at it this way, we then are forced to ask ourselves which parts of our lives or which actions in our lives need to be bundled up and burnt, and that can be uncomfortable, but the reality is is that if we take a good, hard, honest look at ourselves and our lives, we realize, "Okay, that's real." It also can be liberating, very, very liberating, because there might be parts of your life that you wish could just be bundled up and burnt and disposed of, and you could be liberated from in that way.

And so when we read the story, we think, okay, there's this good guy; of course, we compare ourselves with that. And then there's the enemy, and the enemy's messing with the good guy, right? The reality is that sometimes in our lives, that is very, very true. Sometimes in our lives, we are the good guy, and other people are messing with us. But the other reality is sometimes, in our lives, we're messing with ourselves. We're messing with ourselves. We are sowing weeds in our own field. We are sowing weeds amongst our own wheat. And I think the challenge is to recognize that. We're quick to recognize when other people are messing with us. We're slow to recognize when we're messing with ourselves, when we're creating obstacles for ourselves.