If There Is No Demand What Would Be Your Value? | Matthew 10: 1-16

 The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) is a story Jesus told to describe God's generosity. When the master had gone to the market in varied times of the day, 3rd hour, 6th hour, 9th hour, and even at the 11th hour, he was told that these workers were standing there because nobody hired them for work. What would we be if nobody puts us to use?

There is a particular kind of pain that has no appropriate name, we could call it rejection. It is not the pain of being unworthy; but the pain of being exactly what you are; fully, beautifully, completely, and still not being what someone needs. You were a rose. You were a perfect rose. And they were simply, quietly, a people who loved lilies. That is one of the loneliest feelings in the world. Because you cannot even be angry at anyone.

When Vincent van Gogh was alive, he sold exactly one painting. One. He was not a bad painter, history has made that embarrassingly clear. He was, in fact, one of the most gifted human beings to ever pick up a brush. But the people around him, the collectors of his time, the critics, the galleries, they were not looking for what he was offering. They wanted something else. Different flowers, different gardens. He died thinking he had failed. He had not failed. He had simply bloomed in the wrong century. The world eventually came around. It always does, for roses. But Van Gogh never got to see it. And that is the tragedy; not that he was unbeautiful, but that beauty requires a witness who is ready for it. Here is what nobody tells you about roses and lilies: it is not a competition. It is a question of resonance. Success and failures often are not about effort and hard work.

This is hard to accept. We are taught, from very young, that if we are good enough, beautiful enough, loving enough, we will be chosen. We will be wanted. We will be matched. So when we are not, we turn inward immediately. What is wrong with me? Why am I not enough?

But the lily-lover is not wrong either. That is the cruelty of it. They know what moves them. They know the shape of the thing that makes their heart do that particular turn. And it is not your shape. And you cannot be angry at them for it. You can only grieve; quietly, privately, the fact that the world does not always pair people with their counterpart.

So what do you do with this? You do not become a lily. That is the first thing. That impulse, to reshape yourself into what someone else can love, is understandable, it is human. But it is a slow ruin. Because you can sand down your petals, fold in your thorns, change your colour as best you can, and you will still not be a lily. You will only be a rose that has forgotten what it is, and perhaps ugly too.

Not every garden. Not every gardener. But somewhere, there is a person who has walked past a hundred lilies, beautiful lilies, lovely lilies, and felt nothing, and then turned a corner and seen you, and stopped breathing for a moment. That person exists. They may not have arrived yet. The timing may be cruel. But they are somewhere in the world, and they are yours in the way that only makes sense when it finally happens—the way a key makes sense the moment it finds its lock.

Until then, the only real task is this: keep blooming. Because the alternative; closing up, going thorny, deciding that beauty is pointless if no one who loves roses comes along, that is the real waste. Van Gogh kept painting. He painted in poverty and loneliness and the specific grief of a man who knows his own worth and cannot make the world see it yet. He painted anyway. Over nine hundred paintings in ten years. Not for the galleries. Not for the collectors. Because that was what he was, and he could not be otherwise.

The workers standing on the street never lost hope, they remained, until they were called. The master not counting whether it would bring him profit or he would be called a great strategist and policymaker, hired them for work. The workers’ perseverance, and the master’s generosity, made the world more just and beautiful. Survival needs immense hope; and true generosity requires that we see people whom rest of the society do not see—they could even be sitting in the corners of our homes without being loved and called.