Meditation: "I Did Not Know It"
Texts: Genesis 28:10-19a | Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43
Find a comfortable position and allow your body to settle.
Take a slow breath in... and gently release.
You are simply here, in this ordinary moment — and that is exactly where we begin.
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Jacob came to a certain place.
The word is makom — a deliberately ordinary word for a deliberately ordinary location. Jacob stopped there not because something drew him, but because the sun had gone down and he needed to rest. He was running from his own failures. He was a man with plenty of reasons to assume God was done with him.
He found a stone for a pillow. He lay down in the dark.
And the dream came.
Gently ask yourself: Is there a place in my life right now that feels like an ambiguous place — unremarkable, uncomfortable, far from where I intended to be?
Bring that place to mind gently. You don't need to fix it right now. Just let it be present.
· · ·
The stairway was already there before Jacob arrived. The connection between earth and heaven was already established. Jacob didn't build it. He didn't earn it. He stumbled onto it.
He woke up to what was already real.
Gently ask yourself: Where have I assumed God was absent — because I wasn't ready enough, or the place felt too ordinary, too broken, too messy to be holy ground?
Sit with that assumption for a moment. Is it possible that the stairway is already there — even here, even now?
· · ·
The gospel parable offers the same truth from a different angle. A field with weeds growing alongside the wheat. The servants want to pull the weeds immediately. But the farmer says: wait.
Not because the weeds don't matter. But because the plants haven't finished becoming what they are. Pull before they mature and you'll uproot wheat along with weeds. Some things cannot be sorted until they have been given time to reveal what they truly are — and what they offer.
Gently ask yourself: Where am I trying to force a harvest before it's ready? In a relationship, in a situation, in myself — where am I pulling and sorting and trying to resolve what is still in the process of becoming?
What might it feel like to pause and trust that the season is still unfolding?
Rest in that releasing.
· · ·
And there is something else worth receiving: the mixed field may not be something to simply endure. It may be what makes real growth possible. The difficulties we would rather avoid create conditions for resilience and depth that easier seasons never could.
Gently ask yourself: Is there a challenge in my life right now that might be pressing my roots deeper — forming something in me that smoother ground couldn't reach?
Sit with that possibility gently.
· · ·
Now bring your attention inward, to the field within you.
You are not all good or all bad. The ego self and the true self grow in the same field. The ego self — the part that needs to be right, to be in control, to have everything sorted — is not your enemy. It has served you. But it is not the destination.
Gently ask yourself: Where am I trying to purify myself so that God will finally find me acceptable? Where is the effort to root out every imperfect impulse really about perfection and control — rather than growth?
Can you release that effort and trust that you are already beloved in the field exactly as it is?
Let that permission settle in you.
· · ·
Take a slow breath.
The sacred is not waiting for your life to be sorted out. It is already present in the actual, mixed, unremarkable place where you are. Not in a better version of your life. Right here. Right now. In this.
Rest for a moment in this truth:
Surely God is in this place. Even this place. Even now. I did not know it — and now I am beginning to. The harvest belongs to the one who planted the seed.
· · ·
When you are ready, take one more slow breath, and carry this awareness gently with you into the rest of your day.