Skip to main content

Blackberries

Today I picked blackberries in our back lot. There are a great many blackberry bushes there that have been left to flourish. Not from laziness mind you, but because we love blackberries. Or a mixture of both. As I was tugging the juicy black fruit from their vines I noticed something.

(Pontification Alert!)

Notice the picture I took up above? The ripened juicy and quite tasty berries are surrounded by hard, green blackberries that have not completed their journey. Clinging stubbornly to their runners, they're nearly impossible to detach. And why would you want to pick these berries anyway? Bright green, extraordinarily sour, they're not good for much. I wondered why some berries took in all the water and the sunshine given them and became what they were meant to become when right along next to them, receiving water and sunlight in equal measure, others did not flourish. They did not grow. They did not progress. Their skins hardened and refused entry to the water and the life-giving sunlight and they stopped growing.

I think people are a great deal like these blackberries. Two siblings, living side by side with the same parents, the same love and devotion and spiritual instruction, sometimes do not receive the Word in the same manner and therefore do not complete their journey and become what they were meant to be. It doesn't mean that they won't eventually get where they need to be, but it does mean a great deal more effort needs to be made in order to overcome the hardness of heart and the 'greenness' of their spiritual desires.

Some may need more time, others immediately grasp the sunshine and the water and all the marvelous nutrients gifted them and burst forth into glorious sweet blackberries. They fulfill the measure of their creation.

I try to take in the good given me, taught me, gifted me and do something with it. Other times I'm like the hard green berries that don't allow the sunlight in. I hope that one day I'll have none of the hard green parts and all of the sweetness of a faithful Saint who has fulfilled the measure of her creation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Go ahead....tell me the truth :)

Popular posts from this blog

Online Friends

I'm sure you've heard by now that blue is the new black, forty is the new thirty and they're lying through their teeth when they say that last thing. Also, imaginary childhood friends (you know you had one) have been replaced with online friends. They're the same in that no one ever really sees them, but you talk to them, you play with them, your other friends and family think you're just this side of a restraining jacket and you're a lot older than you were when you first had friends you never saw. Sure they're real you might say in that mocking tone you have . Well stop that. Save your mocking for later on when I tell you all about my Internet friends. No, I can't see them, or touch them, although some of them have asked me....um, well, we'll go into that later. People have become friends with other people across the world, sometimes they've become friends with people they'd never become friends with in RL. That means real life for ...
31 comments
Read more

The Boy

Will Soon Be Graduating From High School This means, in some small measure, I have successfully managed to get him through 12 years of school and to the age of 18 alive. No small accomplishment, that. Today he called for a ride home after he rode the bus most of the way to our house. As it was about 90 degrees outside, I obliged. I'm a good mom, plus it got me out of a very hot house and into the sweet deliciousness of my air conditioned vehicle. My oldest and youngest daughters went along for the ride and they spotted The Boy before I did. "What's up with his pants?" Indeed. The operative word for his pants was up . He wears those extremely skinny jeans and he'd rolled them up to about knee level and he was walking towards us with a grimace on his face. He was in pain. You see, five hours earlier, in the throes of near heat exhaustion, he rolled the legs of his pants up and then his legs swelled up. He was unable to remove his own pants or roll down what he...
20 comments
Read more

Wheeeeeeee!

Today I was awakened to the not-so-delightful sounds of enormous dump trucks, (you know the ones that are a dump truck and they haul a trailer behind?) dumping truck load after truck load of dirt behind my house. Then the most incredibly noisey and squeaky (do they not grease the tracks on those things??) grader began shoving the dirt and rocks around. I had to fight the urge to throw a can of WD40 over the fence to the driver. It wasn't even eight in the morning. It wasn't even 7:30 yet. So I reluctantly arose from my bed and cleaned up the kitchen. After it was spotless, I went back upstairs to my freeze-zone (the only room in the house with AC) to do some online banking and make calls to check on medical bills, etc. As I was finishing up, in walks my husband! At first I had a moment of Oh-no-he's-lost-his-job terror. Then it passed after he smiled. Seems they ran out of work for the day. Odd, but then that's Boeing. So hubby was roped into going school cloth...
19 comments
Read more