One of my favorite memories as a kid is picking blueberries from the blueberry bush at my grandparents’ house. Normally more went in my mouth than in the bowl, but I thought it was the greatest thing in the world to get to eat something that I had picked with my own hands. The best was picking the blueberries and then helping my grandmother bake them into a pie that we got to eat while it was still warm with vanilla ice cream on top… I’m drooling on the keyboard just thinking about it.
This weekend I got the chance to pick blueberries at my grandparents’ again. My family was there to spend time with my grandfather, and he mentioned that some of the blueberries were ripe and ready to be picked. I immediately grabbed a container and made my way around the corner of the house to pick all the ripe ones I could find. It was harder work than I anticipated. There are clusters of berries all over the bush, and I figured I’d just have to find the clusters that were ripe and be able to grab 6 or 7 ripe berries at a time. Not the case at all.
See… blueberries don’t ripen in any semblance of an orderly fashion, especially not this early in the season. In each cluster there might be one or two—three at the most—ripe berries, and the rest are still green. You have to look very carefully to find the ripe ones cause they might be hiding under leaves or other un-ripe berries. If it had been later in the summer, when more berries were ripe, my job would have been much easier. Instead, I found myself looking and looking again and looking again and still realizing that I had missed some ripe ones.
And as I was picking, I heard God speaking to my heart, using the experience to teach me something about myself.
There are many verses in the Bible that talk about us “bearing fruit”. We are likened to plants and trees that go through the process of growing from seed stage to fruit-bearing stage. We are told to take root in and draw our “nutrients” from Jesus so we can bear good fruit. We are warned that we can recognize others (and be recognized ourselves) by their fruit, whether good or bad. We are reminded that pruning must occur to make any plant more fruitful and that those plants that stop bearing fruit will be cut down.
Lately, I’ve been very impatient with myself and my fruit-bearing abilities. I’ve mentioned before that God has been doing a lot of work in my life over the last year or so, but I very often feel like that work hasn’t been fully productive. I’m not seeing the handfuls of ripe fruit that I’m expecting… And the stuff that does seem to be ripening sometimes seems completely random and not at all related to what God seems to be working on in the moment.
So on Saturday, God used a blueberry bush to remind me that I need to be patient. I realized that just like the blueberry bush, my life is producing fruit, but not all of it is ripe yet and it’s not necessarily going to ripen in an order that makes sense to me. I may need to move aside some leaves to find the ripe things, but that’s not even really the point. The blueberry bush is alive, rooted deeply in the soil, pulling nutrients from soil, water, and sun. The bush doesn’t produce the fruit by its own will… it’s a natural consequence of the process of living that the bush does on a daily basis. In the same way, my fruitfulness is a natural consequence of the process of living in Christ, receiving life from Him that yields good fruit. The fruit will come in its own time (or really, God’s time); I just need to focus on drinking deeply of Christ so the “nutrients” needed to produce the fruit are present in my life. And I need to learn to be grateful for the presence of even un-ripened fruit… it’s just as much a sign of God’s work in my life as the ripe stuff.
Seek to live rooted in Christ, dear ones, and ask Him for eyes to see the fruit He has already produced.
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