That same night, I was travelling back to New York. When I was in Rio, my father was always travelling for work. It was a holiday for me, though! I made the most of it, especially at the beaches and I was already feeling sad to know that the day had come to go back home. Sitting right in the front row of the church, I listened to my father, the pastor, preaching about the parable of the Tares and the Wheat. “Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his fi eld; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.
So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” Matthew 13.24,30. And suddenly, it seemed as though he was speaking to me only, he was describing who I was.
I had heard this parable, had read about it too, but this time it was more real, as if the penny had fi nally dropped. That message related to me … I was a ‘tare’ all that time… I grew up with the wheat, I looked like ‘wheat’, no one ever imagined that I was not wheat! But my destiny would not be like that of the wheat. When my father called on those who would like to become wheat to come forward to the front of the altar, it was as if God was giving me another chance, calling me by name.
It was everything I wanted! Nevertheless I would have to stand up and go before the altar in front of those thousands of people, assistants, pastors, and all my family … What a difficult thing to do! Everybody would know my spiritual condition which I’d ‘created’ for so long … That’s when I thought: ‘What does it matter if everyone has this image of me if that’s not true?’ So I went forward and this time I was not going to impress anyone nor because everyone was going, nor because it was expected from me, nor because it was the right thing to do. This time I was going because I really wanted to. STEP TWO: Have the desire to truly change There will be more next week …
In faith
Cristiane Cardoso