Hail-bitten Fruit

Summer storms are staggering in their beauty. They're powerful and destructive and wild. With winds whipping around at 100 km/hr, flinging crushing hail and biting rains, they are unstoppable. The ferocity of lightening and chilling temperatures combine to flatten, char, freeze, break, topple.

Sometimes our own lives are hit by storms that look a lot like a summer squall (Can you be in a squall if you're not at sea? I should look that up.). Crisis, fear, grief, complicated relationship, the daily grind ~ These things have the same effect on our mental, emotional, and spiritual health as a crazy weather system has on our crops, our cities, our gardens.

The Bible says that you can tell if a person knows God by His traits in their life. Specifically, they'll have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. God calls those bits of Himself "fruit." He compares Himself to a tree, and compares us to the branches. The evidence that we're connected to Him will be good fruit.

A friend and I had a conversation about those attributes over coffee the other day, acknowledging that we would love to be able to reflect God by carrying those qualities around with us all of the time.

But storms come, right? And when storms hit, fruit takes a pounding.

Our family has been waiting expectantly for Fall when we'd be picking the largest harvest of apples that our trees have ever produced. The branches have been so weighed-down with perfectly forming fruit that we've culled the clusters so that the remaining apples will be larger and even sweeter.

Last weekend a fierce storm whipped through our yard. Every apple on every tree is ruined. Their ripening flesh has been torn apart by icy shards of hail. They're hanging desolately from stunned branches, surrounded by shredded leaves. There was no hope of them surviving that storm. They were unprotected, exposed. Good fruit is vulnerable to all sorts of menace, I guess.

When life is calm and uninterrupted by heartache or difficulty, producing good fruit seems a natural course. In a storm-free season, when God seems kind and gentle, we might find ourselves exhibiting a lot of His goodness, His faithfulness, His self-control (Imagine producing so much good stuff that it had to be thinned-out just to facilitate the eventual beauty of the remaining produce? I wonder how, exactly, God does that culling?).

When we're battered by difficulty and broken dreams and death and sickness, some of that fruit is going to hit the dirt in a hurry. Some of it will keep clinging to the source of it's life, but it will be pock-marked and inedible. Some of it will need to be chucked.

But storms pass and new growing seasons come.

Our apple trees won't give us more good fruit this season. They'll need to rest now; to regroup through the winter and into the spring. If you've been slammed with too much reality, it's okay to rest, to recover. Cut yourself some slack and don't worry too much about the state of the fruit that's dangling off your wounded branches.

Do, purposefully, connect (re-connect) with the source of your own Life. Be sure that you're attached to the Living God Who nourishes, nurtures, enables you to survive this season and grow into the next one. You'll be showing evidence of His Life in you before you know it. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Gentleness. Faithfulness. Self-control. That's what God looks like. And you reflect Him. One bit at a time. Even after a storm.