Every harvest you’ve ever admired had weeds growing in it.
Every drop of oil you’ve ever valued came out of a press.
We like to talk about outcomes: the portfolio that compounded, the business that finally broke through, the family that moved from a generation of survival to a generation of choice. We say much less about what grew beside those outcomes, and what had to be crushed before they could flow.
This issue is about both.
Part One: The Servants Had a Point
In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the story of a farmer who sows good seed in his field. While everyone sleeps, an enemy comes and scatters tares among the wheat. Nobody notices until the blades spring up and the grain begins to form.
The servants rush to the master. Didn’t you sow good seed? Where did these weeds come from? Shall we go and pull them up?
His answer is one of the most counterintuitive lines in scripture: No, because while you gather the tares, you’ll root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.
Notice what the master does not say. He doesn’t say the tares are good, and he doesn’t say they’re imaginary. The servants were right about the weeds. They were wrong about the timing.
The tare in this story was most likely darnel, a grass that looks almost identical to wheat in its early stages. By the time you can tell the two apart, their roots are intertwined underground. Pull one, and you tear up the other.
That is the first law of any meaningful harvest: what you want and what you don’t want often share a root system.
Where We Weed Too Early
In money, most of the damage isn’t done by the tares. It’s done by servants in a hurry.
Consider the investor who watches a portfolio fall 20% and “cleans it up” by selling everything. Research from major asset managers has repeatedly found that the market’s strongest days tend to cluster close to its weakest ones. If you pull yourself out during the bad weeks, you often uproot yourself from the recovery that follows. The volatility and the growth were drawing from the same soil.
Consider the business owner in year two. Revenue is lumpy, a client leaves, and cash is tight. Every instinct says to rip it out and go back to certainty. Yet year two is often exactly where wheat and tares are indistinguishable, where you can’t yet tell whether a setback is a failure or the early shape of a breakthrough.
Consider the diaspora professional who relocated for opportunity. The higher salary came with distance, loneliness, and obligations back home. Some days the tares feel taller than the wheat. But the opportunity and the cost were planted in the same season.
None of this means ignoring genuine danger. Some weeds have to go now: fraud, debt at punishing interest, a strategy you never understood in the first place. Discernment matters. The lesson isn’t to tolerate everything. It’s to not let the discomfort of seeing tares push you into decisions that destroy the harvest.
Part Two: No Oil Without the Press
If the wheat and tares teach us about patience, the olive teaches us about process.
A raw olive fresh off the tree is intensely bitter, practically inedible. Its value isn’t in how it looks on the branch. The value is locked inside, and it only comes out one way: under pressure.
The olives are crushed into paste, and the paste is pressed. What flows out is oil, used for light, for cooking, for healing, and for anointing. In the ancient world, oil was wealth.
Here is something worth sitting with. The garden where Jesus prayed on the night before the cross was called Gethsemane. He was in such anguish there that He asked for the cup to pass from Him. The name means “oil press.”
I don’t raise that lightly. It is sacred ground, and our financial seasons are not His. But the image has stayed with me for years: the place of the deepest crushing carried the name of the thing that produces oil.
Everyone wants the oil. Very few sign up for the press.
We want the anointing without the Gethsemane. We want the dividend income without the decade of reinvesting, and the financial freedom without the years of living below what we could have spent. We want the credibility without the seasons nobody saw.
More of This Means More of That
Put the two images together, and a principle emerges that holds far beyond farming:
You cannot have more of this without more of that.
More return comes with more volatility. More growth comes with more drawdowns. A bigger business brings bigger problems, and greater influence brings more critics. A larger harvest needs a larger field, and a larger field has room for more tares.
We often pray for increase and then resent the terms. But the terms were always part of the package. When you seek a higher expected return, you are by definition accepting a wider range of outcomes. That isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.
So the mature question isn’t “How do I get the harvest without the weeds?” It’s “Can I stay rooted long enough for the harvest to reveal which is which?”
There is a second mature question: “Is this crushing, or is it destruction?” A press produces something. If a season is costing you everything and producing nothing (no skill, no equity, no character, no progress), that isn’t an oil press. It’s a leak. Know the difference.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
Here are three questions to sit with this season.
What am I tempted to uproot right now? It might be a strategy, a savings habit, or a venture. Is the problem real, or am I just uncomfortable with how things look in spring?
Where am I being pressed, and what is it producing? Name the oil, even if it’s still only a trickle.
Who decides when it’s harvest? In the parable, it wasn’t the servants. Set your time horizon before the storm, not in the middle of it.
The field will be sorted, and the harvest does come. Until then, the wheat and the tares grow side by side, and the olives wait for the press.
Stay planted.
The more I learn, the more I discover how little I know.
