I posted this this video before. I was just thinking on some observations about a group of things.
The wheat and the tares are planted together at the same time, albeit from different sources. At the time of planting, a seed just looks like a seed. Even when they sprout, they are indistinguishable.
I have shared this before, but I will tell it slightly differently now: the Lord once came to me with his hands cupped together, holding a bunch of seeds. He said, "what kinds of seeds are these?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "how would you find out?" I said, "by planting them and seeing what grows." He said, "so it is with all mankind. You can't know who they really are until you incrementally offer them better things over time."
It is amazing to me to reflect on my time here, thinking about all the situations where a difference was made between undifferentiated things: an idea, a set of ideas; a person, a group of people; a thing, a collection of things, and so on.
I marvel that the Lord knows all these differences beforehand. He knows the girls in the pink from the rest. Those kids all thought they were in the same kid choir, but they weren't. That girl in the pink is operating on a different frequency and, if she hasn't already, she will be surprised when she finds out those other kids resent her differences. They won't find them to illustrate to them something more or better than what they have. The kid version of this is to make fun of and belittle the oddity. The adult version includes that, but adds to it telling lies about, casting out, and causing physical harm to the oddity--anything to preserve the illusion that what they already have is as good as it gets.
God is indescribably patient. He is so amazingly patient in how unrelentingly he arranges for us to encounter these girls in pink in our lives, hoping we will wake up to the differences between us--a necessary thing in order to advance.
You can't advance without first making a difference in something previously undifferentiated, and you can't make a difference in something previously undifferentiated without also demonstrating the way to become better.
There is no difference between helping someone be better and showing them how they are worse than they thought. This is a hard truth, and it is the core of why receiving the gospel is so hard for those who are prideful--who are more interested in how they are presently than how they could become by changing.
The Lord is indescribably patient. But he is also just. And while he and others can make certain sacrifices to temporarily delay his justice, it must eventually snap back into place forever. That adjustment is coming, and has in fact already begun. When he comes, he will separate the girls in pink--few as they may be--from the rest.
The girls in pink may think they are alone because they don't yet know other girls in pink. But he will show them that not only are there multitudes of girls in pink, when assembled, they will further be differentiated among themselves.
His purposes in intricately arranging the world so that they are initially separate is to seed the entire human race with everything necessary for all people to ascend to him as much as they are willing. After the girls in pink have provided sufficient demonstration to their peers of what it is like to live closer to the Lord, they will be divided from them and joined to those more like them. This is a repeating process, which culminates in the complete organization of the human family, from those least like God to those most like God.
The eternal arrangement is for all people to be colocated with those most like they are.