Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘Die when I may, I want it said of me that I plucked a weed and planted a flower wherever I thought a flower would grow.’ Someone said that the whole process of evolution in this world is to produce useful things, and that what is useful will go on from strength to strength, while what is useless will be eliminated. It leaves us with the question of whether we are people who take out of life more than we give, or give more than we take.
This was the message in Jesus’ parable about a figtree, which, after being planted in good soil and tended for three years, by which time it should have been fruitful, still failed to produce anything. Its owner gave it one more year to change.
The message is: God is infinitely good to us, but eventually we have to show something for it.