My parents were farmers. I grew up working the land alongside them. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of my father's death — a man who sowed good seed in me long before I understood what that meant.
Every farmer knows: good seed alone is not enough. The soil matters.
In today's Gospel, Jesus tells us the seed is the word of God, and the soil is the human heart. God is always sowing — through Scripture, the Eucharist, the events of daily life, even through suffering. The question is never whether God is speaking. It is whether our hearts are ready to receive.
Jesus names four kinds of soil: the hardened path, the shallow ground, the ground choked by thorns, and the rich soil that bears fruit. It is tempting to sort the people we love into these categories, and to imagine we know how the story ends.
Consider Monica, mother of Augustine. For seventeen years she prayed and wept over a son who mocked her faith and lived far from God. A bishop once told her, "It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish." She did not know when the seed she planted would take root. It did. Augustine became one of the Church's greatest saints, and he later said his mother's tears did more for his conversion than any argument.
But we must be honest: not every mother's story ends this way. Some mothers pray for years for a son caught in addiction, begging God to bring him home, and death comes first — sometimes the son's death before hers, sometimes hers before his. The harvest she hoped to see with her own eyes never comes.
We cannot promise her the ending she wanted. But we can say this: her prayer was not wasted. Love offered to God is never nothing, whatever we are permitted to see of it. Grace does not work on our timeline, and it does not end where our sight ends. A prayer poured out in tears may still be working in ways only God can trace, in a soul, in a family, across years we will never witness. We do not get to see the ledger. We trust a God who is more merciful than we are, and who does not measure a life only by its final chapter, however painful that chapter was.
The first reading carries the same hope: "Return, rebellious children... I will give you shepherds after my own heart." God does not abandon hardened soil, even the soil we buried.
Saint Sharbel Makhlūf lived decades of hidden prayer whose fruit only became visible after his death. Grace often works beneath the surface, long after we have stopped watching — and even after we ourselves are gone.
So examine your own heart today. And if you carry a prayer that was never answered the way you hoped, entrust it again to God, who finishes stories we cannot.
Never decide too early that a story is over. Not theirs. Not yours.
Saint Sharbel Makhlūf, pray for our families. Amen.