Waiting for the Harvest

Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. (Isaiah 55: 7-8)

Much of the third season of Falling Skies revolves around the strange things that are happening to Tom and Anne’s daughter Lexi as a result of her hybrid alien/human DNA, the most notable of which is the fact that although she is only eighteen months old, she looks like a young adult. In the episode “Door Number Three,” we find Lexi in a cocoon, metamorphosing into who knows what, while the rest of the community debates what to do about her. Many think that she should be destroyed lest she emerge with tremendous power and the ability to destroy or enslave the humans once and for all. Tom tries to be, if not the voice of reason, then the voice of compassion and love. For the sake of his child, he has to convince everyone else not to do anything rash and out of fear. He wants them to wait and see what comes out of the cocoon - there is a chance she might come out completely on the side of the aliens, but they have no way of knowing this for certain.

In Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who plants some wheat, but his enemy comes along and sows weeds in the same field among the farmer’s good crop. When both wheat and weeds start sprouting, the farm hands want to pull up the weeds. After all, it would be irresponsible to let the weeds grow along side the wheat, taking the nutrients from the soil that should be going only to the good plants. They want to make a preemptive strike, get out the Roundup, get rid of the potential threat before it has a chance to do something bad.

God, like the farmer in the parable and Tom Mason, says, Stop! Wait! Don’t do something stupid that you can’t reverse! You need to wait for the plants to grow up so you can be sure of the difference between them or you will pull up the good plants along with the weeds. You need to wait for Lexi to come out of the cocoon and find out for sure what has happened to her so you don’t kill her for no good reason.

May we always love people and have compassion for them, never writing them off as irredeemable, never trying to do God’s work for him - only God can tell for certain what a person will become and only he can make the determination of Wheat or Weed.